Gett

The explicit statement of Gett is clear: The Israeli justice system is completely patriarchal and of a smothering misogynous tradition. The 45,000 cases of women denied divorces typifies that.

The fictional Vivian Amsalem is put through a trial lasting over five years because her husband refuses to grant her a divorce (a gett). Even then the rabbinical court can only recommend he grant her one; they can’t impose it. A husband, of course, has no trouble unloading an unwanted wife.

As directors Ronit and Schlomi Elkabetz told the Palm Springs festival audience, they focused the film entirely on the courtroom because that is to what plaintiff Vivian’s life was reduced. There are no objective or director’s shots in the film; every shot is from a character’s perspective. This film is the third in a trilogy with the same actors/characters, that was initially based on their mother’s life but moved further away into this general social issue. 

The last shot is of bare feet in sandals leaving a room and a heavy black door slamming behind. Vivian is going back into the room where her Elisha will finally grant her gett on condition she will never be with another man. The shot suggests she is only entering another prison. As soon as the 15-year-old girl was married she began to feel she was in a prison. She suffered thirty years of marriage and bore three children before finally walking out. But the trial for a divorce only proved another prison. Now she enters a third, caged in the promise which her cruel but very religious husband exacted.

The judges are three old men, rabbis, old school, with no tolerance for the woman, her arguments, her emotions. They instinctively side with the husband and expect the wife’s traditional subservience to him. Even some of Vivian’s family witnesses side with him. The neighbour’s wife is so submissive to her husband that he stays and contributes to her testimony. Only when he leaves does she under cross-examination let slip his tyranny. In contrast, a brash woman only alienates the judges by the indecorum of her language and observations.

The divorce trial opens into two larger issues. Not just divorce but the entire Israeli social landscape is affected by the power of the orthodoxy. The rabbinical court’s sole authority over marriages and divorces is a powerful emblem of the larger problem, a secular state still throttled by religious orthodoxy. Hence the assault on women riding buses with the haredim, presuming to pray at the Wailing Wall, daring to take office in the outcast Reform movement. In short the Jewish orthodoxy is as inhumane and dangerous as the Moslem orthodoxy. In fact, the traditional misogyny is not limited to Israel or even most powerful there. It holds worse sway over the Arab nations around her.

     But the film has a larger address still. At one point Vivian says “It’s easy to blame the one who yells. Those who whisper venom are innocent.” Even in our more liberal societies women are seriously disadvantaged in marital matters. The genders are wired for us to expect the men to be rational, quiet, unemotional, and when their wives turn emotional, express their feelings, want to be heard and heeded, they’re dismissed as hysterical. This was the key issue in Vivian’s marriage. Her husband’s detached silence drove her to throw crockery at him. It’s apparent in the three judges’ anger and disdain at the two women who speak with emotion. We may have a better justice system but our marriages are rarely free of the dynamic targeted in Gett. Here divorces may be easier to get but mutual respect in marriage? Not that much.