The Secrets

Review By Camryn Hansen

A soft and thoughtful film that explores themes of love and self-realization in the rich but rigid context of orthodox Jewish tradition, The Secrets tells the story of Naomi, the brilliant, devoutly religious, and impossibly stunning daughter of a prominent rabbi who, after her mother’s death, decides to postpone her marriage to her father’s best rabbinical student and spend a year studying in a Jewish seminary for women in the town of Safed, the birthplace of Kabala.  Due to the orthodox community’s disapproval of women’s academic pursuits, preferring them to marry, have children, and support their husbands’ religious studies rather than developing their own interests, the Safed seminary cannot openly operate as a place of serious study, but must advertise itself to the public as a wife-training and match-making service.  Within its walls, however, the headmistress encourages students like Naomi, who has harbored the forbidden wish of becoming a rabbi since childhood, to pursue religious knowledge in the name of orthodox women’s “silent revolution,” to become men’s equals under religious law. 

Soon, into Naomi’s life barges Michelle, a headstrong, dark-eyed young woman whose wealthy family has sent her to the seminary against her will to become more devout, and possibly secure a husband.  Initially, the two girls, each standing for the antithesis of the other’s beliefs, alternately bicker and ignore one another.  But when they are both assigned to deliver food to Anouk, an ailing French woman who has traveled to Safed to seek God’s forgiveness for a horrific crime before she dies, Naomi and Michelle develop a tentative friendship.  When they discover that the rabbis of Safed will not help Anouk seek redemption due to the nature of her crime, Michelle, who is intrigued by the woman and her mysterious past, convinces Naomi to use her intimate knowledge of Jewish mysticism to help Anouk redeem herself without the rabbis’ involvement.  Together, deeply honoring the ancient texts as they simultaneously defile them for doing so as women, Michelle and Naomi piece together from traditional cleansing rituals a new, four-part ritual to deliver Anouk from sin.  To keep their actions from the two-faced seminary, they meet and perform the rituals in secret.  Anouk, who unquestioningly accepts these women as her spiritual guides, becomes more and more dependent on them as her illness grows worse.

To further complicate these girls’ struggles to define themselves within or without the established boundaries of orthodox religion, at some indefinite point, the friendship between Naomi and Michelle crosses yet another boundary.  It crosses it subtly, and with so much hesitancy and reserve that you hardly know it’s happening…but it crosses it nonetheless.  In a moment that demonstrates the growth that has come from her guidance of Anouk, Naomi embraces the new dimension of her relationship with Michelle, having finally come to understand her decision not to marry her loutish fiancé.  Michelle, initially much more resistant to a non-traditional expression of love than we might have expected, eventually warms up to the idea too.

Since the way that all this plays out is as unpredictable as it is tormenting, I’ll give away no more of the plot.  I will say, however, that this film is a magnificent exercise in subtlety and understatement that touches on love and loss, guilt and forgiveness, devotion and independence with as fresh and gentle a hand as I have ever experienced.  I absolutely loved it, and I hope you will see it.