Before I saw this film last night, I admit I had fallen into a trap. The kind of trap where I assumed this film would be about an Orthodox community in Israel who, for the convenience of keeping the family together, decides to go machmir or do a chumrah and engage in some made-up, anti-woman stringency where they pressure a daughter to marry in a levirate marriage, only with all the genders reversed. It sounds dark, cruel, and maybe something I dreamt up after reading about frumkes and the Saudi Arabia-like conditions for women in Kiryas Joel, NY.
But Fill the Void (2012) is not just about the choice of a partner by the young daughter, Shira, in the family. And here I take issue with the general consensus that there’s an echo here of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. Perhaps that is what the culture of young marriage designed by matchmakers as it stands in some corners of the Orthodox Jewish world looks like to an outsider but as the film shows, among the very frum, there is a different concept of marriage at play than in the secular world. Perhaps it is a more ancient way of practicing marriage. And the practice as it’s portrayed in the film is not universal across the Hassidic world. Watching this movie with the Chabad rabbi and rebbetzin, as I did last night, was helpful in this respect, especially when the rebbetzin, from Brooklyn, proclaimed about the community portrayed on screen, “wow, now that’s a different world!”
In the frum idea of marriage in Fill the Void, the husband and wife don’t know each other very well or not at all. Romance plays only a minimal role in the arranged marriages portrayed here and love is almost nowhere to be found among young couples of marriageable age. A few of Shira’s friends get engaged to people they barely know. She herself becomes ecstatic at the idea she might get to marry someone she sees from afar in the dairy section of a grocery store. She can project all her fantasies on him because he is an unknown quantity. On the other hand, she is traumatized by the concept that she might have to marry someone she already knows, her brother-in-law. They never even seem to meet and when they run into each other on an elevator, he won’t even look at her, which is custom for unmarried couples. In the context of this situation, the fact that Shira knows her brother-in-law to some degree is something of a letdown to her. Although there is a case to be made that societies married within the clan and indeed within the family in times of crisis or for lack of a better solution, Shira’s disappointment in being matched with her widowed brother-in-law has to do with her expectation of exogamy in her marriage.
This is not to say that the Orthodox depicted in the film do not believe in marriage based in love and attraction. There is plenty in the film that is very erotic, the looking, the restraint, the lack of touching and the conversations themselves can be extremely moving and emotional. But this eroticism comes after knowing someone and that always happens after marriage in the frum world depicted here.
Certainly the crux of the drama has to do with Shira’s big decision whether to follow her mother’s desires and marry her brother-in-law or to live out her fantasy of marrying an unknown young man who is her age. A meddling aunt and one of Shira’s friends are both engaged in a bit of sabotage to make sure that he doesn’t marry Shira. But the surprising side of the story has to with the brother in law, Yochay. He is interested in Shira because she is beautiful and related to his beloved dead wife. He sees in her the nascent qualities he loved in the mother of his child and he understands that his child’s aunt would be a motivated and suitable mother for the infant. But he wants her to be an adult woman with desires and the ability to think for herself about how she would potentially love him. Shira is not prepared to think in this way. In fact, one would go so far as to say her society keeps her from having this sort of ability to think in these terms. Were she to marry another 18 year old, we discover in one of her age-appropriate dates, the conversation would be insipid and would never deal in romance. That’s because when males and females are separated severely and boys are especially trained to stamp out their sexual desires for women before marriage and women are coached to control their behavior in public for the sake of modesty, there is no hope any connection between the genders before marriage. And everyone is dressed head to toe especially the women who also wear shapeless clothing and foam-formed turbans to conceal their hair. Outside of the context of a marriage, there is also no concept of developed romantic desires, just fleeting superficialities.
Surprisingly, few critiques of this film looked at the strange situation of an older man looking to be with a mature woman and not finding that in a pretty but immature 18 year old. Yochay’s prepossessing good looks, self-assurance and aplomb in the face of a personal tragedy and loss are all obviously attractive qualities that an undeveloped young woman cannot perhaps appreciate. Seeing this on-screen instead of some tired, patriarchal reading of their relationship was refreshing and I believe likely due to the director’s gender. Or because of her keen observation about certain men like Yochay who have had successes in marriage and emotionally matured because of them. He is definitely troubled and tells Shira he “can’t understand the signs” of the situation and lacks understanding about “what he is supposed to do.” And this is an important point to make: while many reviews focused on how prescribed every aspect of Hasidic daily life in the film is, how controlled the body comportment, and how suffocatingly claustrophobic some of the interior shots of the film are, the film is really about a situation that is not covered by tradition or halakhic law. There is a similar situation about a levirate marriage where the brother of a deceased man is obliged to marry his widow in an ancient practice that was actually for the good of the woman: she could be supported and remain in the family where her first marriage took place. But if children are involved, the situation doesn’t usually happen. And it’s an obligation but not exactly a forced situation and it doesn’t apply if the genders are switched as in the case with this film. And so halakhic law can’t solve this one with precedent. So while the death of the sister, wife, and mother of an infant baby is one void to fill, another one is the void that is left open when a situation arises where there is no law to determine how to act. And what fills the space? People, family, individuals, and in fact a lot of conflicting feelings but at the same time, the desire to be honest, and the capacity to get emotionally hurt (as happens to Yochay, who approaches Shira with some uncomfortable but honest statements about why he thinks they should get married). Her childish cruelty when confronted with statements of what seems to be real (though tentative) love cause Yochay to jettison the marriage proposal and the rebbe to withhold his approval of the match for most of the film.
This tension remains with the film to the end, even after Shira and her brother-in-law finally do get married. The wedding scene is beautifully filmed with extreme close-ups and blurred backgrounds, forcing the viewer to assess the situation by looking at the character’s faces. And the mood is spiritual, ecstatic and terrifying. One can imagine both Shira and Yochay both barely able to stand or speak because they have been fasting and praying all day. They are both surrounded by their own gender and the heightened state of emotion during the badeken (where the bride is covered with her veil by the chosson) is palpable. And then when the couple enters the “yichud room” to have their first meal alone together in a small space as husband and wife, the characters show us what the true void is of any relationship: a radical unknowing of the other person. Whether we “fill” this void with knowledge sooner or later, or indeed never, that structural reality of all marriage likely never changes. It doesn’t matter what social system you come from, whether frum, secular, Jewish or anyone else. It’s a universal mystery.