Fridae

I never tire of watching of the inimitable Marcello Mastroianni. His charm is easy to describe, difficult to fathom, and yet once experienced, cannot be denied. He's a secretly comic actor who gets cast in melodramas, the dramatic actor who's cast in films that are secretly comedies. What makes Mastroianni the actor so watchable for me also works for Avi Nesher's The Secrets, a melodramatic film that's secretly an existential comedy which stars several dramatic actresses whom I suspect may not be in on the joke.

Noemi is our perfectly (mis)cast heroine, a prodigious daughter of a renowned ultra-orthodox rabbi who suffers the ignominy of being match-made to daddy's most brilliant student (who still turns out to be a clod in comparison, and an absolute chauvinistic pig to boot) on the day of her mother's funeral. Understandably, this is why after witnessing years of narrow-minded male oppression in the household, she takes leave to study at a seminary for girls, secretly harbouring the desire to be the first female rabbi. I take it she's probably mad that her father didn't say she's the son and heir he'd always wanted.

As fate or some divine force would have it, our aspiring female rabbi is tasked with various challenges that test her maturity as a religious scholar and future spiritual leader, such as getting along with her roommates in the seminary, one of whom smokes, cusses, and grew up in the liberal den of Paris. And as fate or some divine force would have it, the two incompatible students are tasked with sending food to a deathly ill, recently released convict who beseeches these wise young women to help her find her way to atonement and absolution before she shuffles her mortal coil. And I'm sure there's a divine force in this film, for after learning neighbourliness, tolerance, and kindness, the friendship between our protagonist and the 'bad girl' grows into something far more emotional and intimate and now she must learn how to overcome prejudices of her own and others.

As a boarding school drama, The Secrets plays like a pure melodrama and an almost Gothic film where the fragile purity of its denizens and the threats to it from outside and within form the concern of the cinematic narrative. The cleverness of Avi Nesher is to direct the film as a secretly existential comedy where an over‑proud conservative protagonist is subject to the tests of a more or less liberal divine force, rises to the occasion, and learns all the 'right' lessons.