A young Chasidic wife and mother from the Mile End district of Montreal feels suffocated by the strictures of her community, so she takes up with a secular French Canadian man and abandons her former life in the film “Félix and Meira,” scheduled to open April 24 in Los Angeles.
Director Maxime Giroux said he and his co-writer, Alexandre Laferriére, lived in Mile End alongside the Chasidic community, which was a very insular, separate world.
“Because we knew nothing, we were really curious about them, like a lot of people here in Quebec, and a lot of people in the world,” Giroux said. “So we decided to do the story of a guy falling in love with this Chasidic women — and that’s the reason we decided to do the film. Curiosity.”
To prepare for the film, Giroux and his collaborator read books about Chasidic life and reached out as well. “I started to talk to them in the street — I started to go to the synagogue to see how it was inside the synagogue, and I started to meet some ex-members of the community, and those people were really the key to the film,” he said. “If the film exists … it’s because of the ex-members of the community who shared their stories with me, and who also worked on the film. Five former Chasids are in the cast.
“All those people were really there to watch me, to teach me how everything is on the inside, because it was impossible for me to go inside — I’m a goy.”
Giroux described Félix (Martin Dubreuil), who is dealing with the death of his estranged father, as an adult who still acts like a teenager. Meira, played by Israeli actress Hadas Yaron, who also portrayed a young Chasidic woman in the 2012 film “Filling the Void,” is an adult who has a child, but never got the chance to experience her teenage years.
“She wants to feel that kind of love that we have when we are teenagers, at 14 or 15 or 16 years old,” Giroux said. “That’s why she goes with this guy. He didn’t grow up. Both of them are, in a way, naïve. They just want to live in the moment.”
That’s one of the qualities Yaron said attracted her to the role of Meira. “She goes with what she feels. She explores it. She goes with it — I think it’s so brave. And she makes mistakes. I mean, she does things that will affect her life greatly and dramatically, but she does it anyway. I really adored that about her.”
Yaron was particularly impressed by the way the two lovers manage to connect against all odds. “I’m not sure they will carry on afterwards,” she said. “It was the right moment for them to get to know each other, but it won’t necessarily be a big love story. It was just that moment in life where they find each other, and they have a lot in common — their search, their pain, their loneliness, their curiosity, their exploration — it was just beautiful to me.”
The actress, who characterized herself as a secular Jew from Tel Aviv, thinks there is a certain point, not seen in the film, when Meira starts feeling she doesn’t agree with or even understand Chasidic rules. For example, the prohibition against drawing or listening to music, and the expectation that a woman should have eight, 10, or even 14 children, when she only wants the one child she has.
“There are all these cracks and moments that you start questioning the way you live, and I think she feels this way,” Yaron mused. “There’s a moment she’s saying to Félix that she doesn’t have the right to look men in the eye, and I don’t think it’s a rule or something that’s written somewhere in the Torah. I think it’s her — it’s the way she saw it or she understood it. And maybe it’s just her feeling trapped in this world.”
Yaron also pointed out that, although the husband in the film cannot bend when it comes to his rigid religious precepts, he proves to be a loving, generous human being.
“[Giroux and Laferriére] didn’t make him a bad religious man; they’re all people. They live in a certain way, and it doesn’t fit everybody. And I think Maxime did a great job not judging it,” she said. “He said that every time he has some kind of judgment about something, he wants to make a film about it, so he could open his eyes to it, so he can explore it, so he can understand it and stop judging it. … You can feel it in the film. It’s not judging at all. It just tells a human story, and I really admire that.”
“Félix and Meira,” opens April 24 in Los Angeles.
More news and opinions than at a Shabbat dinner, right in your inbox.