To begin with, a real Orthodox Jewish woman, from an Orthodox Jewish community, would not bother making an oven kosher for use if she couldn't count on her own flatmate to try to keep it kosher, or even to know what's kosher and what isn't. She wouldn't go to a swimming pool where men are allowed in at the same time. She wouldn't even hold a conversation alone with a strange man on a rooftop. We're given to understand that the heroine of this film isn't the typical Orthodox Jewish woman anyway, because she likes to sneak out to the movies; but obviously the real reason for her atypical behavior is that without it, the plot of the film could never occur. Also misrepresented is Reform Judaism: a Reform rabbi explains soberly about the interaction between the living and those who have passed on, and although with enough effort you could probably find a Reform rabbi who would say almost anything, I think you would look hard before you found one who claimed that the dead soul goes through experiences, and harder yet before you found one who claimed to know exactly what those experiences are. All that said, what we have here is a well acted film albeit a doubly formulaic one-- formulaic both in the progress of its love story and in its reconciliation of ostensibly incompatible ways of life.
Review of Loving Leah
