Thanks to watching the Coen brothers' A Serious Man and Joan Micklin Silver's Hester Street I knew what a Gett was, but little else when I first watched the film.
A religious Jewish divorce, a Gett is apparently the only type of divorce you can get in Israel. The film is about a Morrocan-Israeli couple, Viviane Amsalem and her pious husband, Elisha, who are getting a divorce. It quickly becomes clear that the divorce is not Elisha's idea and that he doesn't want to grant it. The rabbinical court tries to be fair, but the drama drags on for years as Elisha cannot bring himself to divorce his wife.
The film is brilliantly shot almost entirely within one room (there are a few brief scenes that take place outside the courtroom in the waiting room of the building as Elisha and Viviane wait their turn. The camera work is still but it feels vibrantly dynamic and that's because the camera is always showing point of view of one of the characters so we are always in their skin. We only hear about Elisha and Viviane's marriage through how they represent it in court and through their neighbour's testimony but it's easy to see how dysfunctional and claustrophobic it feels and how awful it is to be held hostage to a system in which only the man can make the ultimate decision to sever the marriage.
I didn't know this going into the film, but the movie is actually the last part of a trilogy, all starring Ronit Elkabetz and Simon Abkarian and all directed by Elkabetz and her brother Shlomi. This helps explain why the characters are so lived in (these people have been playing them for a decade), but even on its own, without knowing anything about the previous two films the film stands as a masterpiece in its own right, one of the best courtroom dramas I've ever seen which says so much despite being so pared down.
It is the last ever film both as an actress and as a director for Ronit Elkabetz, who unfortunately died in 2016. But as an end note to her career she could hardly have done better. Gett is a masterpiece.
A religious Jewish divorce, a Gett is apparently the only type of divorce you can get in Israel. The film is about a Morrocan-Israeli couple, Viviane Amsalem and her pious husband, Elisha, who are getting a divorce. It quickly becomes clear that the divorce is not Elisha's idea and that he doesn't want to grant it. The rabbinical court tries to be fair, but the drama drags on for years as Elisha cannot bring himself to divorce his wife.
The film is brilliantly shot almost entirely within one room (there are a few brief scenes that take place outside the courtroom in the waiting room of the building as Elisha and Viviane wait their turn. The camera work is still but it feels vibrantly dynamic and that's because the camera is always showing point of view of one of the characters so we are always in their skin. We only hear about Elisha and Viviane's marriage through how they represent it in court and through their neighbour's testimony but it's easy to see how dysfunctional and claustrophobic it feels and how awful it is to be held hostage to a system in which only the man can make the ultimate decision to sever the marriage.
I didn't know this going into the film, but the movie is actually the last part of a trilogy, all starring Ronit Elkabetz and Simon Abkarian and all directed by Elkabetz and her brother Shlomi. This helps explain why the characters are so lived in (these people have been playing them for a decade), but even on its own, without knowing anything about the previous two films the film stands as a masterpiece in its own right, one of the best courtroom dramas I've ever seen which says so much despite being so pared down.
It is the last ever film both as an actress and as a director for Ronit Elkabetz, who unfortunately died in 2016. But as an end note to her career she could hardly have done better. Gett is a masterpiece.