Disengagement is imprinted across Meira’s face at the Shabbat meal. Looking on warily from across the dinner table, her husband, Shulem, is disappointed by his young wife’s disconnection from the role she has been given. Meira (Hadas Yaron) and Shulem (Luzer Twersky) live in Montreal’s Hasidic enclave, a community bound by strict observance of ritual and tradition. Women are expected to obey their husbands and present them with many children. Meira has borne one child, whom she loves, but has no wish for more.
The French-Canadian film Félix and Meira is no ordinary story of infidelity, but a carefully constructed narrative of desire and regret, discovery and the search for home as Meira finds love and meaning outside her community. Even as she is inwardly estranged from her tradition, the man she meets, Félix (Martin Dubreuil), has long been separated from his controlling, just-deceased father. Random encounters in their neighborhood bring them together. The secular Félix is inexplicably besotted while Meira becomes curious, peering at him from around a tree trunk as he sits alone on a wintry park bench. What ensues for a while is an uncertain game of emotional and erotic push and pull back.
Directed and co-written by Maxim Giroux, Félix and Meira presents a situation of more than usual emotional complexity. Félix is a bit of a wastrel, an irresponsible bohemian who has had trouble supporting himself; Shulem is a good man in his way and sincerely loves his wife; Meira has known nothing of the world beyond her Hasidic community and should have been allowed to grow older before being cast into marriage and motherhood.
Félix and Meira is trilingual with central characters speaking in French, Yiddish and English, but tells much of the story and expresses its often unspoken tensions visually through settings and gestures. Meira continually plays with the mousetrap in her Montreal flat, perhaps in sympathy with the mouse? The enigmatic concluding scene leaves room to imagine regret at leaving familiar surroundings and uncertainty over the direction her pursuit of happiness has taken.
Félix and Meira screens at 9 p.m. on Saturday, Feb. 20 and at 5 p.m. on Sunday, Feb. 21 at the UW-Milwaukee Union Cinema as part of the 19th Annual Festival of Films in French. The festival runs at the Union Cinema Feb. 12-21. For more information, visit uwm.edu/french-film-festival/.
Félix and Meira
3 and a half stars
Hadas Yaron
Martin Dubreuil
Directed by Maxime Giroux
R
