Butler's Cinema Scene

Menashe Lustig

“MENASHE” My rating: B

82 minutes | MPAA rating: PG

It takes a while to get a handle on Menashe (Menashe Luskin), the hapless, rotund Hasidic grocery clerk at the center of documentarian Joshua Z. Weinstein’s first foray into fictional filmmaking.

Ruddy cheeked, balding and bearded, Menashe is like a clumsy, disheveled dancing bear. He’s got plenty to do at the tiny shop where he works in Brooklyn’s Borough Park — carrying crates, mopping floors, helping customers — but he’ll ignore his duties in a heartbeat if he spies an opportunity for a philosophical discussion on some obscure point of religious practice. His employer is perennially exasperated.

Menashe wants more than anything to live the life of a good, pious Jew, but fate conspires against him. His wife Leah recently passed after a long illness, and his rabbi has ruled that Menashe’s son Rieven (Ruben Niborski) must live with his holier-than-thou brother-in-law Eizik (Yiel Weisshaus). Tradition maintains that a child must be reared by a mother.

Remarriage isn’t likely. Menashe and his late wife did not get along and he much prefers the life of an ascetic bachelor. A coffee date with an eligible widow is a disaster; it ends with her eye-rolling diss of Hasidic men: “Your mothers spoil you; then your wives take over.”

Moreover, for all his dreams of Talmudic scholarship, he’s got a rebellious streak. While other Hasidic men conform by wearing their black greatcoats and hats, Menashe goes about in his in shirtsleeves with just a yarmulke pinned to his thinning scalp.

The screenplay by Weinstein, Alex Lipshultz and Musa Sayeed follows Menashe and young Rieven over several days as the clock ticks down toward the boy’s relocation to Eizik’s joyless household. It’s a last-gasp father-and-son fling marked by Menashe’s usual screwups — at one point he forgets to close the back door of a delivery van and dumps $1000 of fish on the pavement.

It quickly becomes evident that young Rieven is the more mature of the two.

All of this has been captured with handheld cameras that seem to be recording life rather than a scripted narrative. And, indeed, the story behind the film is amazing.

Leading man Luskin is pretty much playing himself here — he is a widower who had to give up his son to relatives. He’s a bit of a rebel who has run afoul of his sect’s leaders by posting comic YouTube videos.

Moreover, “Menashe” — one of the few films made in Yiddish in nearly  70 years — was shot on the sly with hidden cameras so as not to draw the wrath of the insular Hasidic community. Director Weinstein doesn’t speak  Yiddish…he had to have a translator on hand at all times.

Another film might have been critical of the complex (some would say smothering) rules by which the Hasidim live and worship.  But “Menashe” isn’t picking a fight. Its protagonist loves the faith and the community of which he is a part.  It’s just that he’s doomed to be  a square peg in a world of round holes.

| Robert W. Butler