Love across a cultural divide
Gripping and powerful romance embraces feelings of ambiguity
In a strange way, Félix et Meira is so powerful, precisely because it’s so understated. Co-writer and director Maxime Giroux specializes in telling his stories with much nuance, as was the case in his very different 2011 feature Jo pour Jonathan, a harrowing drama about a Quebec teen obsessed with illicit car racing.
This time, Giroux and his coscreen-writer Alexandre Laferrière, turn their attention to a whole other social milieu, setting the film in that part of Mile End, a neighbourhood in Montreal, where the Hasidic community coexists with its more secular neighbours. It is partly about the contrasts between the two communities, differences that are highlighted when a francophone guy Félix (Martin Dubreuil) becomes infatuated with a married Hasidic woman named Meira (Hadas Yaron).
Both are in a vulnerable place. Félix has just lost his father and is trying to come to grips with his death. Meira is clearly suffocated by the strictures of her community and her domineering husband. As soon as her husband Shulem, (Luzer Twersky) steps out the door, she reaches under the couch, snatches her vinyl album, flips it on the old-school turntable and is grooving to some smooth soulful tunes.
When he unexpectedly returns and hits the roof over the fact that she’s listening to secular music, she collapses on the floor of the living room and pretends to play dead. In short, she is not a happy camper.
When Félix first approaches her at the local diner, she brushes him off and she’s clearly terrified by the thought of even engaging in a conversation with this unusual character. But gradually he breaks through her defence mechanisms and they strike up a rather tentative relationship, both unsure where this is all going.
One of the reasons it works so well is that Giroux embraces the ambiguity of the situation. It would’ve been easier to portray Shulem as an overbearing tyrant delighting in keeping his wife in subservience, but as the story unfolds and he begins to realize what’s happening, he shows real empathy for his wife’s struggle to reconcile her social/religious values with her desire to break out of a world that’s destroying her.
Félix is also anything but onedimensional. He’s confused and a little self-centred, but his heart is in the right place.
All three lead actors are topnotch, particularly Yaron, who just lights up the screen with energy, making us feel her aching need to break free.
The film stumbles a little in the final reel, notably with an ending that really seems out of place, but that’s a small quibble for a movie with dialogue in English, French and Yiddish, that does such a great job of capturing this crosscultural romance.