A Price Above Rubies

A Price Above Rubies

Though scoffed at by some professional Jews, writer-director Boaz Yakin’s 1997 second feature (after Fresh), about the painful break of a young wife and mother (Renee Zellweger) from her husband and Hasidic community in Brooklyn’s Borough Park, is for me a potent and very moving polemic about the oppressive misogyny often found in Orthodox Jewish life, predicated on a kind of patriarchal mind-set that seems surprisingly close to attitudes found throughout the Middle East. After becoming involved in the jewelry business through her husband’s double-dealing brother (Christopher Eccleston), the heroine finds herself drifting further and further from her family; once she begins to champion the work of a Puerto Rican artist who makes jewelry (Allen Payne), her ejection from the Orthodox Jewish community becomes total. Yakin isn’t always successful in shoehorning various forms of magical realism–appearances of the heroine’s late brother and a spectral bag lady–into the story, and the denouement, like some of the events preceding it, may seem a bit overdetermined. But this is still a powerful and persuasively acted piece of dramatic agitprop about a neglected subject, provocative and spellbinding. 900 N. Michigan. –Jonathan Rosenbaum

Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): fiml still. Read more