Hester Street

It's pretty tough to build a realistic set of the Lower East Side, New York City, 1896. The Godfather films did the best they could. When directors shoot the distant past of our great grandfathers, they usually shoot in tempera hue antiquing the scenes, so we feel we are looking through a time machine. In the case of Joan Micklin Silver's, Hester Street, she shoots with black and white stock. All I'm saying, audiences won't believe it is the past without a newsreel or spooky tempera projection.

The documentary feel to Hester Street, the authentic clothing and dialect, the old Russian to English dialect fills the viewer, especially Jewish filmgoers with a weird sense of nostalgia since no one today, in 2006 is alive to tell the immigrant story. The poverty, crowded conditions, popular prejudices, and alienation were a fact of life. It is amusing that these immigrants assimilated, learning English, building jobs, and business within two generations; all hardship forgotten consciously, but I would assert, not unconsciously.

Carol Kane, Gitl, is a wonderful young country wife flabbergasted by the modern, secular ways of America. Her husband, actor, Steven Keats has left the greenhorn, religious Jew nonsense behind as he takes on a new girlfriend, a hottie for her day. His wife arrives with child unexpectedly thwarting his plans. Keats rejects her old world ways. Waiting in the wings is a boarder, a religious man that admires Gitl. A simple plot, no, but satisfying.

Joan Micklin Silver is an unheralded, enterprising US indie filmmaking, a pathfinder for women daring to break the glass-ceiling in the probably most sexist post in the film industry. Her debut feature, produced by her late husband Raphael D. Silver, is based on Abraham Cahan's 1896 novella, an exclusively Jewish tale about immigrants who come to Lower East Side of NYC, and their acclimatisation of a new life in the land of hope, where the collisions of culture, religion and moral codes escalate attendantly.

Jake (Keats), whose yiddish name is Yankle, is a young Ashkenazi Jew from Russia, assimilates himself to the American lifestyle quite smoothly, staying in a tiny room on the titular street in Manhattan and earning his living as a seamster, he hooks up with a single dancer Mamie (Kavanaugh), who is also a Jewish immigrant, in a dancing ball during the opening sequences, where the vintage tactility honed up amazingly by Black-and-White graininess and yesteryear finesse, instantly charms and attracts viewers as a comedy skit from the silent era.

Jake is rakish, all spruced up, he is determined to erase his ethnic traces and aims to be a real Yankee, proudly. Through his impertinent jokes about a greenhorn, Silver seems to inform us, he is not a character we should show a certain amount of appreciation. Steven Keats comes into his own to characterise a stomach-churning impression defies any sympathy.

Jake's carefree bachelor days are over once his wife Gitl (Kane, who was Oscar-nominated for her brilliant calibre in seething intensity trapped inside a serene mound, and it is one of the most inspiring nominations accredited to the often publicity-steered Academy) arrives with their son Yossele (Freedman), whose name is changed to Joey under his insistence. In order to provide a place for the family reunion, Jake borrows Mamie's savings with an unwittingly false promise, and takes his co-worker, a bookish bachelor Mr. Bernstein (Howard) as a room to split the expense.

Gitl is a beautiful, unassuming and sensible girl, in everyone's eyes, she is the perfect wife should be cherished by her husband, especially to the neighbour Mrs. Kavarsky (the late Doris Roberts, thrust by her spitfire probity), her stalwart protector. But not for Jake, Gitl represents everything he is eager to jettison, their conjugal bond is flimsy with Mamie hovers around under the pretext of collecting her money. It always takes two to tango, at this step, if Mamie still wants Jake, and is willing to help him get out of the marriage, what else can we say? They truly deserve each other.

On the other hand, Gitl and Mr. Bernstein finds some kindred spirits under the aegis of Silver's tender characterisation confined in their cramped apartment. The third act can be captioned as "a divorce: Jewish style", improbably farcical thanks to the committed recreation of the scenario. Don't expect Gitl to relent under the influence of sentimentality or for the old time's sake, she might be a shrinking violet but never stupid, Jake is good-for-nothing, but at least, he has the knack to provide a handsome alimony for jilting his family.

HESTER STREET superbly overreaches its ethnographic demography and it is not merely a film for Jews only as it has been merchandised since its self-sustained distribution, in the eyes of a local Chinese who has never been to America or familiar with Jewish culture, the film enchants, seduces and competently relishes in a woman's self-reliant awakening in a foreign land, moreover, it teaches an edifying lesson about how important to preserve one's own distinctive traits without becoming homogeneous. Surely, it is a humdinger of a greenhorn's debut enterprise.

If you're a Carol Kane fan, and haven't seen this film, run out and rent it now (if you can find it). But don't expect the usual eccentric comic character Ms. Kane usually plays.

Filmed in black & white, this is a very atmospheric period piece about a traditional Jewish wife in turn-of-the-century America, whose husband is dissatisfied with her and wants a more modern woman. Carol Kane plays a quiet, thoughtful wife who somehow commands the screen just by sitting there and watching the selfish, thoughtless people rant and rave about her. She is a truer definition of a hero than any of the action heroes that have come out of Hollywood in the past 30 years; thoughtful, indefatiguable and irrepressible, despite the fact that she is firmly part of the traditional Jewish community where women subjugate themselves to men.

This is not an action piece; it's a character and period piece about surviving with dignity despite poverty, repression and injustice. This is the best performance by Carol Kane I have seen, not because she can't do better, but because she hasn't been given another role this thoughtful and dynamic. If she is given more roles like this in the future, she will again prove she is one of the best actresses in the country. A great film and a great performance.

Eight out of ten stars.

With its black-and-white cinematography, soundtrack music, and Jewish characters, this film at times reminded me superficially of a Woody Allen movie. But writer/director Joan Micklin Silver made an original film here. If you like a movie that immerses you in a less-familiar culture you might give 'Hester Street' a try.

Steven Keats plays a Russian emigre who prides himself on the way he's molded himself into a real Yankee in the USA, though the world he lives in, New York's Lower East Side in the late 19th century, is almost exclusively populated by other Jewish immigrants. When his wife (Carol Kane) finally arrives in the New World, however, she has a lot of assimilating to do. This causes the tension which drives the movie along, though it maintains a fairly light atmosphere most of the time.

Keats and Kane do fine jobs in their roles; in fact, Kane was nominated for an Academy Award. Dorrie Kavanaugh and Doris Roberts are among the good supporting cast.

Carol Kane never really found her niche in the movies--only when she switched to sitcoms did her googly-eyed craziness really come off. But in 1975, before we'd gotten used to her comic bravado, she turned in a lovely, Oscar-nominated portrayal of an immigrant Russian Jew in New York that still stuns, even today. Quiet emotions permeate this careful, low-budget, somewhat slight film set on New York's East Side in 1896. Writer-director Joan Micklin Silver has a genuinely sly eye for detail that results in some amusing moments, but for the most part it's a human drama in a thoughtful key which builds momentum as it goes along. **1/2 from ****