The Israeli film Gett: The Trial of Viviane Amsalem, is what a Kafka-esque movie would be if Kafka were a feminist. It is a surreal, maddening, even funny story, which—like the recent Iranian film A Separation—uses a personal tragedy to call attention to a larger travesty, a particular kind of injustice that occurs in the world every day.

The set up is simple. A long-married Israeli woman and mother of four, Viviane Amsalem (the terrific Ronit Elkabetz), wants her freedom in the form of a gett, a Jewish divorce. Her pious and, as we learn, passive-aggressive husband, Elisha (Simon Ekbarian), refuses. According to the laws of the land, the couple must appear before a beit din (rabbinic court) and lay their arguments out before a panel of three Orthodox rabbis. If those judges are not convinced that the wife has grounds to terminate the marriage, the husband’s refusal stands. The wife remains trapped.

For all intents and purposes, she and Elisha are no longer a couple; they do not speak, let alone co-habit. Viviane has been living in an outbuilding on her sister’s property for the past three years. But the judges demand to know more. If Elisha does not beat her, if he does not withhold money or sex, if he is not an adulterer, then he is not a bad husband; and if he is not a bad husband, why should she want to leave?

In vain do Viviane and her lawyer, Carmel (played with power and desperation by Menashe Noy), try to explain that the man and the woman in question are badly matched for each other. She has regretted their semi-arranged marriage, which began when was 15, from its first days; ever since, she and Elisha have made each other miserable. The judges shrug as though to say, Nu? They send Viviane “home”—back to her husband’s house—to try to work it out. When that fails, they tell the plaintiff and the defendant to call witnesses.

Since the entire film takes place over five years (!) in a bleak cell-like courtroom and its adjoining waiting areas, the relatives and neighbors summoned to testify liven up the proceedings that otherwise remain as claustrophobic and dystopian as Terry Gilliam’s bureaucratic fantasy Brazil. They inject some much needed energy and even levity. They also help give a fuller picture of contemporary Israeli society, how insular it can be, how gossipy and constrained, even for those who try to live a modest yet fundamentally secular life. As Viviane’s sister says bitterly at one point, “Life for a divorced woman here is shit.”

The judges seem shocked, but more by the language than the sentiment. They must know that, as grim as the process is for Viviane to gain her freedom, her future is even grimmer: any victory is bound to be pyrrhic. Unless—like the wife in A Separation—she tries to take her children and leave, she will continue to be bound by the laws of a theocracy that values her husband’s honor over her happiness.

Image: Ronit Elkabetz as Viviane in ‘Gett.’ (Courtesy of Music Box Films)

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Part II of the Lifetime Original miniseries “The Red Tent,” based on the 1990s book club classic by Anita Diamant, begins with murder and mayhem in the land of Canaan and then takes a sharp right turn into ancient Egypt—less Game of Thrones and more a Bronze-age Call the Midwife.

At the end of Part I, our headstrong heroine Dinah has taken love at first sight—and “Smash the Patriarchy!” misandry—to an unwise extreme and married the prince of Shechem without her father’s approval. Her brothers Simeon and Levi, whose bad nature is telegraphed by their scowls and hirsute swarthiness, retaliate. Taking advantage of the fact that the entire city of Shechem has agreed to have its men circumcised in penance for the elopement of their prince, Simeon, Levi, and some shepherds go forth and slaughter.

In a grisly scene, Dinah wakes up screaming next to her husband’s corpse. Her brothers circle back around to get her and carry her back home in a blanket, which they dump unceremoniously at their father’s feet. They try to slut shame her but Dinah is not having it; she rises from her shroud like a vengeful ghost, spewing invective at everyone in sight, particularly Jacob—whose only response to the fact that his sons have killed dozens of innocent men is to run.

Dinah, still stunned and stained, goes back to the palace. Her mother-in-law whisks her away to Egypt, where she had at one point been a queen. You must live, she tells Dinah. Not for yourself, but for your child. One feels that Dinah, like Emily Gould, will make one hell of a mommy blogger.

During labor, Dinah demands an on-the-spot pre-modern episiotomy that will put you off procreating forever. Her micromanagement impresses the local midwife, who suggests that Dinah take up the trade. But when the queen reveals a secret agenda to take Dinah’s son as her own and relegate Dinah to the status of nursemaid and slave, our heroine scrubs floors instead.

Back among the shepherds, Simeon and Levi make another excellent choice and attack their little half-brother Joseph, who we know is good because he is pale and less hairy. After selling him to slave-traders, they take his coat-of-many-colors—it’s actually only brown, tan, and green, but that must have seemed gaudy at a time when everyone wore nothing but homespun puce—and soak it in blood before bringing it to their father. Boys will be boys, I guess! Jacob thinks his favorite son is dead and nearly dies of grief and over-acting.

Dinah’s life gets better after she is released from bondage and goes into business for herself in Egypt: first as a medicine woman and then, embracing her destiny, as a midwife. She even falls in love with, and marries, a nice man who doesn’t seem to want to control her. When fate brings her back in contact with her brother Joseph, though, she must decide whether she is ready at last to make peace with her past.

Even when executed so loosely and, sometimes, painfully, it is fun to see well-known Bible stories recast in a way that passes the Bechdel test. And these endeavors do raise some interesting questions.

There’s very little that’s religious about this miniseries, even though it’s Jacob’s new-fangled monotheism that initially sets his small tribe apart (and so enrages him when his daughter marries a non-believer). Part of Dinah’s success as a midwife is even attributed to her revival of her mothers’ pagan traditions around labor and delivery. In making Dinah the moral center of a Hebrew Bible story, Lifetime actually makes a rather subversive argument: the woman who blends back into Canaanite/Egyptian society is the courageous one, and the famed patriarch, Jacob, is the coward. What does it mean—spiritually if not literally—that we are supposedly descendants of him, not her?

Related: The Red Tent, Part 1: Embrace the Melodrama

The post The Red Tent, Part 2: There Will Be Blood (And Feminism, Sort Of) appeared first on Jewcy.

The goyim had “Peter Pan Live!”; now the Jews get their turn at a televised hot mess with the two-part Lifetime Original miniseries “The Red Tent,” based on the Anita Diamant’s book of the same title, and starring Brody’s wife from “Homeland” as Rachel and Jorah Mormont from “Game of Thrones” as patriarch Jacob. Chaverim, it does not disappoint. Every element of this production is best taken with a grain—or even a pillar—of salt.

“The Red Tent” is not merely cheese. It’s highly artificial, brightly colored, processed cheese, the kind you lick off your fingers after binge eating a bag of Doritos and worry might give you cancer. Unfortunately, unlike its source material—Diamant’s novel was a book-club favorite in the 90s—the televised version of “The Red Tent” is the least Jewish adaptation of a Hebrew Bible story ever made, with the possible exception of Ridley Scott’s Exodus, starring Christian (Christian!) Bale as Moses, coming to a theater near you this Christmas.

If only it embraced its own inherent campiness, it would be so much more fun.

The show begins with a quivering, melodramatic voiceover, in a British accent, no less. America’s conception of foreignness is pretty narrow: to us, an English accent is exotic. Thus the cast, a collection of delicate, blue-eyed European actors, who wander around the desert in makeshift sandals looking lost. (As well as they might: twenty minutes too long under the scorching sun and these pale fools would be melting like candles.)

Both the book and the miniseries are retellings of the violent, controversial story of Dinah, the daughter of patriarch Jacob and his first wife Leah (Minnie Driver). In the Hebrew Bible Dinah is portrayed as a victim and her story warrants only a few verses; in Diamant’s imagination she’s a fully-developed character.

Jacob, you may recall, sought refuge with his kinsman Laban after nearly getting himself killed by tricking his blind father Isaac into giving him the birthright due to his brother Esau. He falls in love with Laban’s younger daughter Rachel—a romance dramatized here with an energetic make-out session by the well—and manages to marry her and her older sister Leah. For good measure, he also acquires the girls’ two female slaves, Bilhah and Zilpah. More bang for his buck.

Before you can say Joseph Smith, the fellow has four wives and children into the double-digits. He needs his own compound, out of the shadow of his grumpy father-in-law. With the help of the local king Hamor, he picks the town of Shechem; but his attempts at serene polygamy are dashed when Dinah and the hunky crown prince marry without his permission. Dinah’s brothers Simeon and Levi take the elopement as a particular insult, and, feeling generally unloved since their father favors their little half-brother Joseph, vent their spleen with some Red Wedding-type slaughter.

We are supposed to root for Dinah because, as we are told several times, she is a “strong, beautiful woman.” Instead her impetuous brand of girl-power feminism feels as incongruous as a plastic water bottle dropped into the set of “Downton Abbey.” She scolds her grandmother for owning slaves, ignoring the fact that her father does too; she promises to uphold her honor and then gets it on with a dude she barely knows. (Hasn’t she seen Frozen?)

We are left, then, rooting for Dinah’s mothers, who will no doubt have to suffer the consequences of the young woman’s poor impulse control. How will they cope? Where will they and Jacob go now? How many different ways can they braid their long, thick, lustrous hair and where do they get their conditioner in the desert? Tune into Part Two tonight to find out!

Ester Bloom is an editor of The Billfold. Her work appears in Slate, Salon, Creative Non-Fiction, New York Magazine’s Vulture blog, Flavorwire, and the Toast, among numerous other publications. The recipient of the 2014 Creative Non-Fiction Prize from Dogwood Literary, she has been interviewed on MSNBC, MTV.com, and by Geraldo Rivera. Follow her @shorterstory.

Related: The Red Tent, Part 2: Let There Be Blood (And Feminism, Sort Of)

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