The demure young girl in long skirt and white blouse slips through the hush of Sabbath Eve, turns the corner, and slides into the back seat of a waiting car. Crouching in the dark raucous with rock music, she feverishly transforms herself into a red bloused, shirt skirted young woman, ready for a night on the town with her friends Yael and Lilach, away from her religious neighborhood.
This opening scene alerts the audience that this is no conventional story of rebellion, with thwarted teens determined to slough off parental or religious restrictions. What accounts for Rachel's flight into the night is not the need to flee some repressive, circumscribed world of Orthodoxy, but the desire for something more and something else: adventure, the company of daring friends, a red blouse, and red lips, even if her forgotten make-up case has her substitute scarlet menstrual blood for lipstick. As the rock music on the radio is replaced by the seductive whispers of the DJ, Sabbath Entertainment identifies itself as a film about temptation, about choices, about risks. Signing off, the DJ's voice wishes Rachel and the twin sisters who are her friends, a peaceful Sabbath, a Sabbath clad in white, a royal Sabbath. The enticing tone on the radio promises more pleasure in the Sabbath Eve than in the girls' intended destination.
After Rachel's night out is cut short, and she returns to wake the next day into the Sabbath's calm, we look in vain for any repression to justify her escapade the night before.Co-writers and directors Brezis and Binnum weave the Sabbath sounds into a symphony of peace, protectiveness, and serenity. The mother prays softly, her rhythm echoed by similarly engaged voices from the outside. The father and son join voices as they practice cantillation. When asked to call Rachel to the Sabbath table, her brother maintains the tune of the cantillation and sings her to the table with a Biblical verse. After the chanting of the blessing over the wine, the family joins in song, the two sisters harmonizing. Rachel, the seeker of excitement, though worried about her twin friends after the accident that had aborted their adventure, is clearly comfortable in the world of the observant. It provides peace and safety she cannot find cocooned in her blanket or hidden beneath the make-up that hides her bruises from the night before. The Sabbath harmony of family and songs forms a magical circle that keeps the ringing phone from intruding. Even when she has to answer the door to insistent knocking and allow reality to enter, she tries to remain within the circle, hearing the faint singing of her family as she listens to the policeman's words. When she returns to the table, she attempts to pick up the thread of the songs in a vain attempt to retain the magic. But the make-up runs to reveal her bruised eye, her song falters, and the girl who had run eagerly from the Sabbath the night before, now leaves it reluctantly, crying for her lost paradise as much as for her lost friend.
This is as perfect a short film as I have seen. The performances are flawless, the language, thanks to a wonderful translation from the Hebrew, colloquial yet poetic, and the sound track a marvel as it both tells the story and underlines it. A story filled with large themes and events is told clearly yet with restraint, even the lyrical sexual moment appropriately understated. Without sentimentalizing the religious world, the filmmakers show us the price Rachel pays as she moves from the house to the street, from the sacred to the profane, and from innocence to experience.
