The movie, "My Father My Lord" -- his name is Abraham

We liked this Israeli film about a Hasidic Rabbi and his son and wife very much (director David Volach). It's lovingly and slowly detailed.

Ty Burr's review in the Boston Globe was laudatory and sympathetic.

The elderly Rabbi Abraham (he seems to be at least in his 60s, with his wife Esther in her early 40s) is devoted to the Torah, his community, and his small family. He defines his life, his world, strictly through the Torah. His young obedient son Menachem gazes up at him while he prays and studies, and senses the instinctual conflicts in the boundaries and dictates of the Torah and his own feelings. You can feel the boy thinking: is it right to expel a mother dove from her nest, dooming the chicks, even though the Torah demands it? Is it right for the Rabbi to angrily demand Menachem tear up a picture of an African native, because the native is an idolater? Is it right that only those who follow the Torah are righteous, as the Rabbi thoughtfully proclaims?

Yet the Rabbi doesn't perform his role without agonizing. It pains him to carry out the demands of his life. He does it because he must. As if to give up on even one of the demands or laws would be the end of his whole construction.

So his name is Abraham: his devotion leads to the film's devastating ending. He can't be blamed for it, can he? Yes, he can be. He can't be responsible for what happens, can he, he who was wrapped up in prayer? He can be.

I would have liked a little less well-mannered reverence in the film, a little less constraint. The tensions between the Rabbi and his wife Esther could have been drawn out more. She's reverent and worshipful to the point of being saintly, yet you can sense her unhappiness and unease. In their bedroom scene, the Rabbi arrives and is apparently disappointed to find her having already said her prayers. She does not speak to him (I think she is not permitted to speak to him, having said her prayers, but she writes on paper to him). Perhaps he was hoping for sex with his wife, and is surprised to find her unyielding. "Are you mad at me, Esther?"

Several times, I was reminded of my last visit to Mount Athos -- the sense of claustrophobia. One day, I was standing in in Daphni, the administrative town on Athos, and looking up and down the streets. I felt a kind of panic. Not a girl or a woman anywhere. Only men. It was a sort of dread, and I felt that several moments watching this wonderful movie.