Unorthodox

Netflix has fast become my most cherished companion during these weeks of lockdown.  While discouraged from leaving the house (I think) by various unclear Tory waffles (not sure why I would take any form of instruction from people who have actively pursued something as stupid as Brexit), my TV has seen unprecedented (pandemic bingo!) levels of use.  It gets switched on while I make breakfast, a weekend brunch affair that has become a daily routine of slowly scrambling eggs and brewing coffee.  If I manage to grab a lunch break between video calls, I’ll treat myself to a quick episode then.  And finally, after work, rather than a rushed Tube commute with angry Londoners, I simply have to stumble from my laptop to the living room, leaving the never-ending avalanche of emails for another day, for a few hours of inert diversion (some of which time is spent wondering what I can do about my growing belly as it protrudes over the elasticated waistband of my tracksuit bottoms).  In all of the quotidian monotony, I’ve had a very good run of Netflix not only entertaining me, but gripping me to my seat: Tiger King, Last Chance U, Cheer and Elite awakened a compulsion in me not to stop until every episode had been devoured.

As the TV powers on, I can’t switch from linear broadcast to Netflix quickly enough.  The news that always seems to be on is, quite simply, the worst.  Blurry contributors garble on from their home studies while showing off their AirPods.  Some sort of Scottish minister holds forth about how corona is affecting Scotland (specifically and endlessly) while a nice deaf lady does sign language in the corner, her face betraying a preference to be doing any else but this.  Everybody speculates about what will happen next while invoking an unhelpful comparison with World War II.  That culminated in the Holocaust, so perhaps we can do a little better in 2020.  I’ve taken to re-watching Friends for comfort (even finding an episode of series one I had never seen – I know!) just to get away from the lazy journalism.  So, I clicked on Unorthodox.

I was immediately sucked in and raced through the four episodes while practically holding my breath.  I’ll be honest that my choice was partly informed by linguistic policy.  After so much Spanish, I was hopeful for something in German to help tune me back in for FaceTimes with friends in Hamburg.  Unorthodox came up in a search for German-language content, but it’s actually half in English and half in Yiddish, with a few other languages scattered across it.  Based on a 2012 book by Deborah Feldman about her real-life departure from an ultra-Orthodox Jewish community in New York, Unorthodox’s setting in a minority religious community was catnip to me as a compelling theme, so I shrugged that Yiddish was similar enough to German and cracked on.

Raised a heathen, the world of any sort of faith eludes me.  You can justify anything with faith.  I can punch you in the face and say it was faith and you can’t get mad.  I can make lifestyle choices based on spurious translations of millennia-old texts and then apply them to other people at will and they can’t get mad.  Unpacking what makes people cling to this sort of thing is fascinating.  I’ve always devoured documentaries about the Amish, while Wild Wild Country offered another view on how these things start and how communities respond.  I’d also seen the Netflix documentary One Of Us which had given me fair warning about how hard it is to leave not only your ultra-Orthodox community, but your friends, your family and your whole way of life.

Unorthodox is told in two concurrent narratives.  The first, sticking most faithfully to the book, follows our heroine, Esty Shapiro, as she prepares to leave her husband and flee the Williamsburg neighbourhood where she has lived her whole life.  The tension crackles as she secretively breaks free and you can’t help but will her to run away.  The second, which is more loosely only inspired by the book, follows her progress on arrival in Berlin – making new friends, wearing new clothes, eating ham.  Shira Haas blows my mind with her lead performance.  I’m still thinking about it now.  I am so convinced by her journey that I occasionally find myself wondering how Esty is getting on in Berlin.

As such, resisting just one more episode is impossible, as you’ll need to know if she makes it, how she makes it, why she escapes and what happens next, all at once.  This is multiplied by the privileged glimpse into a deeply religious world that is hidden from most of us; the wedding scene in particular is documentary-like in its setting out of customs for us to witness.  While voyeuristic, there isn’t a sense of condemning what we see.  We are simply able to view it, and the characters’ responses to it, in the frame of Unorthodox’s sociological storytelling.  Marriage is crucial in Esty’s community, as procreation is seen as its primary purpose, their drive to repopulate a historical hangover from the Holocaust (which I inadvertently foreshadowed in my self-pitying introduction).  Affection and sexual enjoyment are therefore fairly low down the marital agenda, far behind taking the bins out and weeing with the door open.

Meanwhile, in Berlin, Esty is confronted by the fact that the aftermath of genocide, rather than leading to a life-defining duty, is more practically incorporated into daily life as a part of history and geography.  The Berlin scenes rely slightly too much on happenstance to take Esty’s journey forward, her leeching on to a multinational group of idealistic young musicians being met with enthusiastic adoption when surely most people would ask a hanger on to get lost – maybe that’s just the London in me.

In conclusion, Unorthodox offers compelling drama and an eye-opening insight into a community and their practices that you might not know much about.  I now want all my dramas to be set in devout sects, for the hats alone.  But I warn you, set aside sufficient time to get through the whole thing, as you won’t be able to stop after just one episode.  This should be fine, though, as it’s not like we can go anywhere.  Maybe lockdown is our own orthodox lifestyle that we can’t escape from.