His faith seems to being him no joy or compassion - not even much solidarity with his fellow faithful - just a borderline antagonistic self-righteousness in the pursuit of his undoubtedly righteous mission. Part of the problem is that Yoel is such a difficult character. It has even colored his relationship with his young son, whom he sees only occasionally, and then spends most of their time haranguing him for not applying himself to his Torah studies. Facts are facts, and Yoel’s mother not being born Jewish makes him goyim too - despite a lifetime of such dedicated adherence to Jewish tradition that it has somewhat alienated him from colleagues and family members.
#The testaments movie rating tv
It’s particularly destabilizing because, as established in an early TV interview scene, as a historian, he is deeply opposed to any relativism around the idea of objective truth.
Secretively pursuing this lead, he discovers that his mother not only is not the woman she’s always claimed to be, but was not even born Jewish.įor Yoel, who wears the untrimmed beard and payot of strictly observant tradition, the information is a thunderbolt that undermines everything that defines him. In the course of his painstaking investigations, which turn up evidence of a systematic cover-up, Yoel accidentally happens upon a startling find: the face of his mother (Rivka Gur) flashes up in a restricted file, attached to a different name. And they underline the story’s thematic concern with truths buried beneath our feet: Yoel’s current project is getting the Austrian government to admit that a massacre of 200 Jewish forced laborers took place in the small village of Lensdorf during the waning days of the war, but his efforts are complicated because, after 21 excavations, he has not been able to locate the mass grave. Yoel ( Ori Pfeffer) is a leading Holocaust scholar working in a state-of-the-art research institute in Jerusalem - the wide shots in this location, with its clean, modern lines that seem to suspend people in white space above densely packed bookshelves, are among the most striking in an otherwise rather pallidly shot film.
Given little reason to care about this man, it’s hard to care about his spiritual identity crisis.
It’s a potentially engaging, provocative topic, and criss-crosses with a richer subplot about a long-buried Holocaust mystery in clever and illuminating ways, but the film’s overall power is hampered by its forbiddingly unsympathetic lead character. It details a rigorously, frostily devout Jewish Israeli historian who discovers that the founding principle of his unyielding worldview is false. Though it may play better in festivals with a Jewish focus, to secular audiences, the main thrust of Amichai Greenberg’s sincerely intentioned but unnecessarily dour debut “ The Testament” is difficult to fully invest in.
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