User Reviews

At a certain point in the movie, someone listens to "How Deep Is Your Love" by the Bee Gees. Or so they say. It doesn't sound like the recording we all know, and apparently it's actually a different version recorded in an Israeli studio. Not that it's a bad version, even considering the singers' accents, but why say it's the real Bee Gees when it isn't? Similarly, the movie has a fine story, basically a tragedy played as a comedy in the context of Israeli politics (much like NORMAN a couple of years before), but it insists on connecting itself to the real-life story of the Shas political party in Jerusalem-- although it does admit that it combines fact and fiction. Rather than muddling the two together, a better idea would have been not to use the Shas name, and to set the story in a fictitious Israeli city to stand on its own merits and let any resemblance to the history of Shas be for the audience to discover.

Still, the movie is very amusing while bringing serious issues to the fore regarding society and politics, the setting looks very realistic, the music is top-notch, and the tragicomedy is a well-proportioned blend.

The Unorthodox recounts the birth of the Shas Party in Jerusalem, circa 1983-4. The film brings together family and political drama, comedy and soul music. Watch it for its Shakespearean-like verisimilitude to cut-throat politics as practiced in the wild, yet the film imparts hope and leaves the viewer feeling upbeat.

One reason for the hope is the script is threaded around proof of a theorem concerning politics. The theorem suggests politics addresses real pain, so don't get caught up in the modern trappings of suits and ties, radio ads and lies.

The birth of the Shas party comes about when a widowed, father confronts the prejudicial expulsion of his daughter from an orthodox school run by a different sect of Judaism orthodoxy. He decides to confront the root cause behind his daughter's expulsion by forming a political party and running in the municipal election in Jerusalem.

The rest as they say is history. Under his leadership, the seedling, frail little political party gets through many trials, reversals and his own heart-breaking back-stabbing, to become a major force in Israeli politics, a mere 15 years on.

The film proves out the rabbinical-like theorem conjectured in its first frames. We know that our hero gets through unheralded for his founding role but secure in his faith in politics. Somehow, after watching the movie, the viewer feels a greater faith in the political process to deliver solutions to people's pain than all the machinations behind the scenes would suggest.

It's worth the 92 minutes of your life.

This very engaging, touching story takes us down two interweaving rabbit holes: a spectrum of Israeli orthodoxy, social and religious, which layers citizens according to their historic origins - Sephardic, Eshkanazi, Mizrachi - and the compromises that idealists perforce make in venturing into effective politics. Though the referents are specifically Israeli, the exposure of political maneuvering is clearly global. What's most Israeli is the tension between the religious and the secular. Hero Yaakov's political awakening begins in a domestic issue: his daughter is expelled from the seminary on apparently false charges of excessive worldliness. The allegations of a slit denim skirt and a TV in the home are fake news. That personal injustice drives the hero into politics. His personal campaign grows into a municipal movement. That success leads to a campaign for the Knesset. Each success breeds new problems, as the stakes rise. Another campaigner softens into lay sentimentality when he hears The Bee Gees. More seriously, a shortcut in name-taking threatens the entire revolution. A campaign contribution melts into an apparent bribe. The need to succeed opens into the thuggery of bare-knuckled politics, within the parties as well as between them. The title works two ways. Its initial register is the religious, where there is a profound conflict between the isolation of the Talmudic scholar and the need to become politically active. But there is a parallel tension between the purity in political orthodoxy and the temptation to compromise its idealism - in order to become effective. That's where the winners lose.

The first problem is that this film is fictionalized but based on real events, so those of us who do not live in Israel and/or understand their politics are at a disadvantage, as we don't know what to believe and have no real context. What we do know is that this is based on the story of a Sephardic man named Yakov who encounters great prejudice in a variety of ways, and finds a rabbi and a radical to create a new political party to represent the Sephardics (which is now known as the Shas party - ironcially, the name 'Shas' is never mentioned once). The first hour is humorous as all three men set about forming this party against many odds, and eventually they are recognized and run for the Knesset. The final half hour begins going downhill as our hero is betrayed by everyone around him, and ultimately is asked to leave the party he helped to create by a shyster rabbi (whom we know is going to screw him from the moment he first appears on screen; no subtlety here) and the two people who have been by his side from the beginning (their betrayal is quite disturbing on a lot of levels; the movie makes clear that they were doing nothing before he inspired them to work with him).

The filmmaker, an orthodox Jew, has no trouble portraying the majority party the three fight against as a bunch of thugs who commit acts that are beyond disgusting to get rid of these upstarts. We never do find out what happens to Yakov's daughter, whose removal from her seminary is one of the chief reasons for Yakov's passion to have his people represented. The very ending (which I will not reveal) is simply not believable.

People have commented on the soundtrack. I didn't hear anything special about it, but it does serve the movie well. The image at the screening I attended was blurred. The acting is excellent, however.

One leaves this movie with an extremely sour taste in one's mouth, particularly when one discovers that the Shas party has had a great deal of controversy of its own, with its share of party officials convicted of fraud and bribery.

I frankly am sorry I saw this, and have no clue as to why it is so well-liked at Jewish film festivals here in the U.S.