System’s injustice on trial in ‘Gett’

The courtroom drama is among the cinema’s most irresistible genres, where rigid formula (the expected) meets the blurted-out confession or the pent-up and finally detonated hidden truth (the unexpected). In the week’s best new film, a highly compressed, exquisitely acted tale of two people who do not belong together plays out as a courtroom saga that, in story terms, runs longer than many marriages.

“Gett: The Trial of Viviane Amsalem” comes from the sister-brother filmmaking team of Ronit Elkabetz and Shlomi Elkabetz. Eleven years ago they introduced a stubborn man, a defiant, divorce-seeking woman and an ongoing struggle in the film “To Take a Wife.” After that came “Seven Days,” revisiting the same couple further along their rocky path.

Now comes “Gett,” which works as a gripping stand-alone courtroom drama. For the uninitiated: a “gett” is a divorce decree obtainable in Israel only through an Orthodox rabbinical court. Tellingly, the filmmakers keep Viviane, who seeks the gett, just off-camera for the first few minutes. She is played by co-writer and -director Ronit Elkabetz in a performance of shrewdly judged degrees of dignity, panic, anguish and dagger-like glares at the man, Elisha, who refuses to dissolve his brittle, bitter shell of a marriage. He’s played by Simon Abkarian, of French and Armenian background. As with everyone on screen in “Gett” – the actors playing the rabbinical court, the attorneys on both sides – his performance comes alive in the silence between the lines, when someone else is doing the talking.

This is no “real time” exercise, even though “Gett” rarely leaves the courtroom. It takes a total of five years for Viviane to receive a final judgment on her gett request. As the film proceeds, we learn more and more about the harsh, one-sided religious law in Israel, and to what degree the rabbis will go to preserve shalom bayit, or domestic harmony. There is no harmony in Vivian’s soul, or in her marriage, which is a beast dominated by control issues more severe than anything in “Fifty Shades of Grey.” Elisha knows he has the legal upper hand, and often he doesn’t even show up for the next hearing. Is it pride or tradition that holds him back from doing the right thing?

Once or twice in “Gett,” as the years grind on (the film’s pacing is steady without being sluggish), the Elkabetzes bring the action to a breaking point. They’re a bit shameless about prolonging the suspense when someone’s about to sign something momentous. A small matter. This is a film about watching and listening as much as it’s about Orthodox Judaism and fairness. Each new shot puts us in the position of those trapped in the courtroom, trying to maneuver their way out of it, soul intact. No prior experience with these characters or the previous films needed: All you need are ears and eyes to relish, in a sick way, the dramatic potential in the staggering patriarchal injustice on view and – despite the film’s claustrophobic setting – the cinematic and performance craft on display.