Strong and Moving!

Best movie ever!

The biggest problem with this movie is it’s a little better than you think it might be, which somehow makes it worse. As in, it takes itself a bit too seriously, which makes most of the movie feel kind of dull.

An old-fashioned movie made with new-fashioned finesse.

It is always good to be able to define yourself. Even if traditions contradict your mind. In this film I saw the case when traditions are evil that rules over weak people. ....and love is not a tradition, it is a decision, not possible without knowing yourself. I like enormously the film, three main actors played excellent. What impressed me a lot were two sequences: the first one - the conversation between а "tradition man" Luzer Twersky and а "non tradition man" Martin Dubreuil; and the second one - when a "tradition man" broke his tradition listening to the song "After Laughter "after his wife left him.

Looking at Felix and Meira, you can definitely see why many moviegoers might walk away unimpressed by it. Many of them will miss what it's about, or why it exists. It is an understated film, but it says something, albeit softly. It's not exactly Romeo and Juliet, not exactly Clash of Civilizations. It's Felix and Meira.The film tells the story of two people in Montreal, who inhabit the same neighbourhood but live in foreign worlds. That might not seem too novel a concept, but there are interesting specifics, as the secular Felix gets to know Meira, a Hassidic Jew- she can't look him in the eyes, can't choose to have only one child in her marriage. It's not an indictment of Judaism or even religion entirely- it's just about a woman who is unhappy with her life, and her liberation. Whether going into another relationship is the answer is another question. I'm not entirely sure what Felix and Meira saw in each other, except for intriguing differences in lifestyle. But it is an interesting parallel how we see at the end that Felix was also bullied to fit into his family, and interesting that Meira's husband sees how this is the case. I'm not entirely sure what decade this film is supposed to take place in. It's sort of timeless, and while belonging to Montreal, may speak to anyone.

Maxime Giroux's 'Felix and Meira' tone is set from the very first frame, captured in black and white. Malka or Meira plays with her soup with a soup spoon, a Shabbos meal. Her husband with finely curled ear locks, wearing a black hat trimmed in sable, and wearing a long black silk coat celebrates the Sabbath with gusto, in song and food and the pouring of wine. Meira feels estranged from this world of ultra Orthodox Jews, living in Montreal. A community that keeps very much to itself; insulated religiously in a world of Yiddish and Hebrew, prayers and rituals. A world in which husband and wife sleep in separate beds, according to tradition; coitus takes place only during days of ovulation; menstruation renders her impure, a ritual bath cleanses her. Malka wears a wig, long garments, She has but one duty to bear her husband many children. She doesn't; after the birth of her daughter she takes up pen and notebook to draw; she has a certain talent. She likes music which her husband forbids. She's listless and wanders aimlessly in her mind. In secret, she takes birth control tablets, for she doesn't want more children. And into her universe comes a secular man, an artist of sorts, a lost soul who feels empty because a strict father has never shown him love or interest since he didn't follow in the man's footsteps, it's inferred. So Felix travels and is now back in his own flat in Montreal, perhaps in Westmount, a Jewish enclave of Anglophone Jews. And as the narrative develops these two souls collide and a desperate, quite love arises between them. Too, late Meira's husband declares his love for her, but she is beyond his pleas for she has left an tradition from which she cut herself off and can never return. (Woody Allen treats the theme but without tragedy in 'Fading Gigolo', and Boaz Yakin treated seriously in the 1998 film 'A Price Above Rubies', with more or less the same outcome as Giroux's film.) The closing scenes are shot in Venice, on a grey day. A in an aside, Meira wishes regrets she has taken her daughter out of structured community, for life with her and Felix. Felix stolidly stares into the mournful cast of Venetian light. The pairing will never be happy, but, it is suggested, that in desperation they will cling to each other.

This film is about the explicit values of two adjacent cultures who live on different sides of a railroad, each reaching for something more … the unknown. For Felix and Meira, the unknown becomes uncertainty. Life and lifestyles are disrupted, communities clash, and traditions unsaddled. This isn't a story of skinheads, hippies, Trekkies, or of Generations X, Y, or Zeds. It is of a girl called Meira and French Felix, each who adopt their known cultural traits. Her identity is repressed, arrested by secret Hasidic customs and protocol where women are quieted and obedient. Apparently of the Satmar tribe, women wear wigs and are in arranged marriages. Felix flits in and out of his family, daring to explore the matrix of love. Meira too openly resists the known in favour of love, romantic love. However, romantic love is not reality. Viewers experience subconscious moments acknowledging resistance to our ostensibly defined lives. Each of us wanting to explore outside known cultural norms. Some may call it slow moving, I call it pace. We aren't rushed through every scene, but given permission to decode the mysteries of the Hasidim. What is uncovered, I cannot tell. What is revealed, is how the unknown can be even more uncertain than what we know.