Car crashes, beheadings, and a sober look at the incongruities of contemporary family and religion!

Quite early on in Tehilim (playing at MoMA until Wednesday), the father of an orthodox Jewish family in Jerusalem crashes while driving his two sons to school. It is one of the most mundane car crashes ever filmed: a spectacle of twisting metal and physics-defying vehicular projectiles this is not. Rather, the father’s glazed-over eyes and somnambular responses suggest he may have had a seizure (here we go, I immediately thought, The Diving Bell of Bethlehem). Instead, the father disappears in the ensuing confusion, and it’s his family that’s left paralyzed and brain-dead.

Without its symbolic head, financially debilitated, and unable to mourn or move on for lack of closure, the family lurches onward like, well, a headless chicken. Throughout the rest of Tehilim, the older son Menachem (Michael Moshonov) and the mother Alma (Limor Goldstein) explore different (often conflicting) coping strategies. French-born director and co-writer Raphaël Nadjari and cinematographer Laurent Brunet create a mood of sober realism with long handheld takes and washed-out colors. The narrative is similarly restrained: there are no epiphanies for the audience or the characters. For the latter, time, apparently, is the best medicine. For viewers too, Tehilim has no easy answers, but certain provocative questions emerge from the mechanics of the family drama.

The rituals of the orthodox Jewish household and extended family, for instance, do not come across well. Alma’s authority over her children is continuously rebuked, her wishes ignored by older male relatives. As Alma’s opinions and desires are repeatedly undermined, a feminist sensibility emanates from Tehilim. The teenage Menachem is similarly bound by the strictures of the male-centric orthodox family. The pressure to fill the stoic patriarch role left vacant by his father threatens to cut his adolescence short, and he lashes out accordingly. The film does not, for all this questioning of familial and religious practices, turn into an agnostic assault on organized religion (this is a restrained film, remember).

If Nadjari’s style is grounded in realism, so are his film’s aspirations: he very subtly calls certain fundamental religious and family structures to question. So while you shouldn’t go into Tehilim expecting all high-speed chases and car crashes, don’t walk into it brain-dead either.

This review appears on The L Magazine blog, and can be read here.