Tamara Piety

It is sort of compelling, in part because I am just trying to figure stuff out, but this last episode was super annoying. Too many things just weird and unexplained. Why the 70’s aesthetic? Why always winter? Why can’t we get a straight narrative somewhere?

This is an incredibly powerful depiction of a true story and an indictment of the way the system handles rape victims.

This was a completely unbelievable show. This woman escapes her orthodox community to go to Berlin where her mother lives but she doesn’t connect with her the first night and so ends up sneaking into a school auditorium because she is homeless. She is discovered and seemingly kicked out, but then, somehow, the issue of where she is sleeping every night seems to disappear and is barely acknowledged. Several characters, including the heroine, Esty, arety merely sketched but not filled out. Esty tells her husband she is “special” but she doesn’t say in what way. Everything somehow magically works out for her. She finds a bunch of friends, she apparently is a talented enough musician that she has a possibility of winning a scholarship from a prestigious music school. The guys she is attracted to is a flat character. Everything is too pat and the Satmar sect of Orthodox Jews caricatured as evil “others.” I have a hard time accepting their beliefs because they are so obviously sexist. But this series made them almost cartoonishly, inhumanly bad. And everyone just looks intently at each other for long moments with no dialogue, but lots of heavy breathing and tensing of body. Indeed, that seems to be the only note that the lead actress plays. Throughout 4 episodes she is almost uniformly tense, suspicious, seemingly on the verge of hysteria or of violence, she widens her eyes, flares her nostrils and breathes heavily. It gets old quickly. The story is as cliched and pat in some respects as a young adult novel, which perhaps the level it was written for, but I found it paralyzingly boring. It was at if “Twilight”, a Judy Garland/Mickey Rooney musical, and maybe “The Notebook” were set in an Orthodox Jewish community. I had to fast forward though a lot of it I found it so tedious. Cannot recommend.

I have used this film for years in teaching Evidence. It is a classic for demonstrating the ways in which various groups of people can see the same pieces of evidence through different eyes.