Click on banner ad to support JWR

Jewish World Review / March 8, 2000 / 31 Adar 1, 5760

Benyamin Cohen

Nothing 'Sacred'

As art and as documentary, 'Kadosh' fails

http://www.jewishworldreview.com -- UNLESS YOU FREQUENT X-rated film houses, "Kadosh" will be the most pornographic and visually disturbing movie you will ever see. And that's a shame, because the mainstream press has called this licentious and tawdry film the best Israeli export ever. Well, that isn't saying much.

The film, the story of the oppression of women in Judaism, has so many glaring inaccuracies, about half way through you begin to wonder if you're actually watching a satirical "Saturday Night Live" skit. A honeymoon scene, in which a man -- so bereft of knowledge of the female body -- has trouble with the mechanics of the sexual act, actually elicited laughter from the audience; had the scene been in a raucous sex comedy, it would have been the funniest moment in the movie.

Unfortunately for filmgoers, Israeli director Amos Gitai is so ensconced in his insular world that the Jewish view of sex -- that of being one of the holiest acts a human can perform -- has become shrouded in a mockumentary of chaos and derision. Indeed, the Hebrew word for marriage, kiddushin, means holy. Gitai has taken this concept, titling his movie "Kadosh," and turned it on its head.

Gitai's drama has two sisters so sexually charged they make Dr. Ruth seem like the queen of abstinence. The sisters -- Rivka and Malka -- spend the entire movie battling inner demons and spiritual yeast infections. By movie's end, what started out as a suggestive drama has become a wickedly deranged horror film. Cap it off with cheesy, overused accordion music, and you've got yourself one of the most embarrassing things to come out of Israel since Barak-gate.

BLATANT RIP-OFF
To add insult to injury, "Kadosh" is practically a scene-by-scene rip-off of the 1998 movie "A Price Above Rubies," starring Renee Zellweger and Julianna Margulies as oppressed Jewish women. In an almost Hitchcockian manner, numerous scenes in "Kadosh" are virtual shot-by-shot replicas of "Rubies," from the mikvah scene to the honeymoon sequence. It's not surprising, considering both films were directed by secular Israelies with a penchant for knocking anything sacred.

By convention, the good guy is supposed to get the girl; in both of these films the "good guy" is portrayed as the non-religious, skanky, grungy, secular Israeli. Secular Israelis have such an inferiority complex that, to overcompensate, they mock anything having to do with religion. Talk about your Freudian complexes.

It's a national shame that secular Israelis have no other compelling story to tell than to poke fun at a sect they know absolutely nothing about. It ends up being unproductive, hurtful, and, quite frankly, being on the verge of anti-Semitic. Maybe I'll give the Anti-Defamation League a call. call.

JWR contributor Benyamin Cohen is a staff writer for the Atlanta Jewish Times and editor of Torah from Dixie. Send your comment by clicking here.

© 2000, Benyamin Cohen. This article first appeared in Atlanta Jewish Times.