Fiddler on the Roof (1971)

  The film’s opening theme immediately declares its subject: (Cue song:) “Tradition!” The fiddler on the roof is the emblem of man trying to pull off a tune, a bit of harmony and joy, in the precarious balancing act that is life — the teeter between tradition and proper changing with the times. But the antithesis is not just between the old and the new. It’s between principle and humanity, between religious dictate and mentschlichkeit. 

Of course Tevye’s drama is his increasing compromise with Jewish tradition as his three daughters choose increasingly anti-traditional marriages. Tzeitel spurns his arranged marriage to the much older widowed butcher, preferring the penniless tailor Mottel she loves. Hodel breaks Tevye’s heart by falling for the radical activist Perchik and then following him to Siberia. They will never meet again. 

In each case Tevye contrives to talk himself out of his initially principled position. “On the other hand…” he muses, before finally accepting his daughters’ choice when he sees the love in their eyes. 

Not so acceptable his third daughter’s choice, when Chava marries the Russian Christian Fyedka. Marrying outside the faith lies beyond Tevye’s range of acceptance. Mercifully, he musters a distant blessing as they separately depart for America. 

Though the film’s popularity and voice seem dominated by its address to the traditions of Judaism, the Russian culture also looms significant. The romances and shtetl life play against the shadows of Russian oppression. Tzeitel’s wedding is broken up by a fiery pogrom. Ultimately the Russian army evicts the entire Jewish community from their village. If the homey Jews have their Tradition of social and religious culture to maintain, the Russians have theirs — albeit based upon antisemitic violence. 

Indeed, as Tevye has his private debates over what’s expected of him, so have the Russian constable and Fyedka. The constable wants to spare his friend the pogrom, but the best he can do — given his Tradition and official responsibilities — is to warn Tevye about what’s coming and then early to send his marauders on to another family.  Fyedka is at first sight moved to stop his pals’ harassing Chava. Their marriage is an equal violation of both their respective Traditions. 

The two dance scenes address this collision between cultures. When Tevye dances drunkenly with Lazar Wolf in the tavern, the intrusive attention by some young Russian men is ominous. The tension eases when Tevye dances with one of them and the bipartisan revelry ensues. In contrast, the Cossacks break up the wedding dance. Beneath the tension and violence, however, the two cultures have a commonality imaged in the men’s kazatsky dances in both scenes. The matching lines of dancing, crouching men point to the humanity that the opposing cultures share and violate.  

As the Russian traditions move some focus away from the Jewish, the script also edges away from religion. Tevye’s conversations with God are just another soliloquy, like his debates with himself, where he’s expressing himself without expectation of result or effect. Tevye’s Bibilical allusions are a mishmash of offkey references — he confuses Abraham with Moses — and homey misattributions: “As the good book says, when a poor man eats a chicken, one of them is sick.”

Similarly, the aged rabbi — proffered as the community’s source of faith and wisdom — is a bumbling comic figure whose utterances have no religious heft whatsoever: “Sit down.”  As for the Messiah, “We'll have to wait for him someplace else. Meanwhile, let's start packing.” His wisdom is rather practical than Biblical, as in his blessing for the Tsar: “May God bless and keep the Tsar... far away from us!”     

So Tevye has it ultimately wrong: “Traditions, traditions. Without our traditions, our lives would be as shaky as... as... as a fiddler on the roof!” It’s the enslavement to traditions, at the cost of humanitarian concerns, like love and compassion, that unbalances the life. The film demonstrates the need — for the Russians as well as the Jews — to overcome dangerous traditions. Of course, escaping the patriarchal tradition is especially important for the women here, who must fight their father and his ways to fulfil themselves. In this text tradition provides the danger not the security. 

Promising Young Woman

  Here’s a director to watch. Writer/director Emerald Fennell’s feature film debut is a richly detailed exercise in woman’s empowerment. (By the way, she’s excellent as Camilla Parker Bowles in The Crown, though too far from rotweiler to be simply accurate.)

        The title points two ways. Cassie was a promising med student, top of the class, when she dropped out. Implicitly, she is living out a promise to avenge the videotaped gang-rape that drove her friend to suicide. That is, Cassie has shifted her dedication from addressing physical disease to the moral affliction of sexist violence. She’s trying to cure the body social politic. Her name evokes the Greek seer Cassandra whose visions were not believed.  

Aptly, Cassie comes to her climactic date, a pre-wedding stag party in the woods, in the guise of a call-girl’s nurse uniform. She even intends a surgery — carving the lost friend’s name into the rapist groom’s chest. The doctor’s stellar career could justify such revenge. The film ends on her complete attack upon male privilege.

Fennell carefully calibrates her scenes. When Cassie strides away from her first turnaround “date” we think we see blood on her clothes. But that would befit a male avenger. Cassie’s not killing the guys that she plays falldown drunk to trick into trying to take advantage of her. It’s catsup from her breakfast burger.  She only wants to expose them. 

Cassie addresses both genders’ role in our pervasive sexism. The men she tempts into thinking they can exploit her helplessness. “I’m a nice guy!” one bleats, frightened of her surprising strength that has shown him to be worse. 

We don’t know if the experience does chasten and enlighten the men, but here’s a sad clue. Pickup Paul recognizes her as the psychopath other guys have been warning about. Even having been exposed, the victimizers blame the victim.

So too the women, whom Cassie exposes for their more respectable assumptions. The Med School dean has crashed the patriarchal ceiling — by assuming the  males’ bias. As the man is innocent until proven guilty, the complaining woman must be either lying or asking for it. Cassie pierces the dean’s shell by hiding away the dean’s daughter and making the rape threat directly personal. With the superior Madison Cassie sets a similar trap. Having gotten her drunk Cassie pays a handsome man to take her friend to a hotel room where she will awaken wondering if she has been taken advantage of. Cassie gives both women the experience of helplessness they wouldn’t believe in Cassie’s friend. 

Cassie’s romantic encounter with Ryan promises an escape from her self-restrictive mission (however noble). Unconventionally, he drinks the coffee she spat into.Their dance in the pharmacy seems to turn the film into madcap RomCom. Most touching are the scenes where the lovers lie on a bed, clothed, chatting warmly. This idyll is disrupted when Cassie sees Ryan in the videotape of her friend’s rape. This sinks him to the level of smug sexist abuser, like the lawyer, like the macho privilege fully revealed at the stag.    

Cassie’s parents suggest a domestic version of the society’s strained artifice. They sit side  by side at the breakfast table, bracing each other without communicating, apparently arrayed against her. Their living room seems a display of expense without taste, frozen in the ‘50s with its plastic-covered upholstery and pseudo-art. The mother seems more disturbed than Cassie. This may be explained when her father says he too misses the lost friend and is so relieved “to have [Cassie] back,” thanks to the brief effect of Ryan. 

One shot sets Cassie against a wall blank except for what looks like a cake icing pattern on the wall. Like the antithetical drunken party scenes this backdrop suggests the false comfort and civility of our predatory dating scene. The moment typifies director Fennell’s full command of her medium.