A four-part drama about a young woman who walks out of her Hasidic marriage and starts again somewhere nobody knows her. Shira Haas is remarkable and the scenes at home are precise and painful; the escape is thinner, and the series is less sure of itself once it leaves the flat.
Esther Shapiro (Shira Haas), known as Esty, is a year married, and on a Friday afternoon, while every other woman on the street is carrying bread home for the Sabbath, she walks out of her Hasidic community with a plastic bag of papers and does not come back. Maria Schrader’s four-part series, created and written by Anna Winger and Alexa Karolinski from a real-life story, follows her into the city she runs to and then keeps turning back home to show, a piece at a time, how she came to leave. It is good, and in its scenes at home it is better than good.
Those scenes are the reason to watch. Schrader lets the rituals run at something like their real length: the matchmaking meeting in a front room, the wedding with the men dancing on one side of a partition and the women on the other, the morning after when Esty’s hair is cut and then shaved. We were braced for that scene and it still got to us, because Haas does not play it as an assault. She sits still and looks at the mirror as if trying to be pleased, and Wolfgang Thaler’s camera stays on her long enough for us to watch the effort fail. Silke Fischer fills the apartments with dark wood, lace at the windows and too many people, and Thaler lights them in a yellow lamplight so warm you understand why anyone stays.
Haas is small and the series uses it. Men loom over her in hallways, and her mother-in-law Miriam Shapiro (Delia Mayer) discusses her as if she were a kitchen appliance that has stopped working. Amit Rahav’s Yakov Shapiro is the programme’s best decision: not a brute but a frightened boy who wants to do right and has been told exactly what right looks like. Their scenes together, in particular in the bedroom, which the flashbacks return to with a frankness that never leers, hurt because both of them are trying.
The new city is where our reservations begin. Esty wanders into a conservatory and within a day a set of music students, Robert (Aaron Altaras) and Yael Roubeni (Tamar Amit-Joseph) among them, have taken her for coffee, to a club and to a lake, and nobody asks her a hard question. Thaler switches to pale, wide, open frames and Justine Seymour swaps the thick tights and long skirts for borrowed jeans, all of which is clear and a little too neat. The city is a lake, a rehearsal room and a kind mother’s kitchen. It looks like a place from a language-school brochure, and the students are as accommodating as its staff.
Then there is Moische Lefkovitch (Jeff Wilbusch), Yakov’s worldlier cousin, whose strand we will not describe beyond saying that it pulls a careful drama about a marriage towards something closer to a thriller. Wilbusch is good, coiled and sly, and every scene he has takes time from the story the series is actually good at. The editors, Gesa Jäger and Hansjörg Weißbrich, are deft at cutting between the two worlds and cannot make these two programmes feel like one. Antonio Gambale’s score keeps to low strings and piano and mostly stays out of the way, which is right; the conservatory supplies the rest of the music.
Dramas about leaving a closed religious world usually pick a side in the first ten minutes. This one mostly resists. The Sabbath songs are allowed to be beautiful; the grandparents, Babby (Dina Doron) and Zeidy (David Mandelbaum), are allowed to love her. The community is never played as a costume, and the series is at its most honest when it lets us see what Esty is giving up along with what she is escaping.
It is a 12 certificate and the sex is more discussed than shown. Watch it over two nights rather than one, with the lights down, and do not be surprised if you find yourself, against the programme’s own intentions, missing the home she left a little.
