Amos Gitai's film Kadosh begins with a man - an ultra-Orthodox Jew in Jerusalem's Mea Shearim district - waking and starting his day. He doesn't waste a second; the moment he's vertical, he washes, ties on his phylacteries and launches into swaying prayer. "Blessed is our eternal God," he prays, "who has not created me a woman" - and we suddenly realise that his sleeping wife, glimpsed at the beginning of this single extended shot, has disappeared from view. Gitai's film is a study of invisible women, and of visible, and audible, men.
Kadosh - Hebrew for "sacred" - is one of cinema's rare serious attempts to examine religious life. It is all the more remarkable coming from a secular Israeli primarily known as a political and experimental film-maker, who is here working with actors who are themselves non-religious. But in collaborating with a co-writer, Eliette Abecassis, who is Orthodox, Gitai conveys a dual perspective - at once a wondering outsider's critique and an inside exposition of what orthodoxy means and how it shapes lives.
Surprisingly, Gitai refers little to the most controversial aspect of Mea Shearim - the community's litigious relationship with the Israeli state, to which it belongs while fiercely proclaiming its exemption and opposition. Kadosh primarily addresses sexual politics within this enclosed world. Meir and Rivka are childless after ten years of marriage and, according to religious law, must separate so that Meir can remarry. While the couple painfully accept their fate, Rivka's rebellious younger sister Malka faces marriage, but loves a young man who has left the community.
The story seems timeless rather than anachronistic - it could be a tragedy from one of the ancient eastern European shtetl communities whose structures Mea Shearim recreates within modern Jerusalem. But the emotional impact benefits from careful distancing. "Rigour, constant rigour," admonishes the militant scholar Yossef, and it's a rule that Gitai scrupulously observes. In the opening sequence, Meir's every gesture is made to register, framed in the severe, unadorned setting of his apartment. The cinematographer Renato Berta's stark frontal compositions make the film severely beautiful while flattening indoor spaces, making it clear that we see all there is to see.
These are people, after all, who leave their lives entirely open to surveillance by God. There is no private space, and ritual observance, which fills every moment of the day, is work. The synagogue seems less like a place of worship than a run-down industrial unit, where men come and go, their stark monochrome dress altogether businesslike: this is a prayer workshop, God's shop floor.
Given the starkness of the terms of reference, the picture of sexual politics is surprisingly subtle. The community's law is a rigid patriarchy: in a televised Hassidic wedding, a lone bride stands among a sea of men's black hats. But it's not just a black-and-white affair, and Gitai teases out the contradictions of a world in which even sexuality is regulated by ritual. When Meir kisses Rivka, he first removes his yarmulke from his head, then replaces it. But the couple enjoy a marriage of real respect and tenderness, not to say erotic intensity, evoked beautifully by Yael Abecassis (Rivka) and Yoram Hattab (Meir): when Rivka describes her wedding night, the phrase she uses is "He honoured me". This equation of love and honour is determined by the law, but will be torn apart by it.
Despite a sensitive, nervy performance by Meital Barda, Malka's story, showing the possibility of dissent, doesn't entirely enhance the film. A successful marriage reluctantly colluding in its own destruction makes a more compelling subject than the familiar story of a rebellious soul facing a bad marriage. Besides, the world Malka is drawn to hardly comes across as a plausible alternative: a sultry lover who sings folk songs in a grungy nightclub (presided over by Gitai himself in hipster sunglasses). The film's glimpses of the outside world feel too much like signposts, as in the scene where a sympathetic doctor shakes her head over Rivka's dogmatism.
The film is most coherent when emphasising Mea Shearim's hermetic enclosure and the contradictions that rule it. The Talmud, the body of law that dictates the community's life, "contains everything and its opposite", comments Rivka's mother. "That way, men can do what they want." Gitai, who filmed in the streets of Mea Shearim, doesn't really need glimpses of the outside for contrast. The real achievement is to make us understand a viewpoint from which the outside world is unimaginable. Nor is he simply out to condemn: in many ways, he respects and delights in the rigour and the energies of this community. Yossef (Uri Ran Klauzner), the film's most unsympathetic character, nevertheless brims with charismatic energy as he prays, entering into frenzied disputation with his God: "I implore you!"
Secular viewers may recoil at the extremity of the world that Gitai portrays, but we come to understand it, even to appreciate the beauty in its severity. Kadosh doesn't simply expose its subject, it honours it; and Gitai's secret is rigour, constant rigour.
Kadosh (15) is at selected cinemas
