Editor’s Be aware: This assessment was initially printed in the course of the 2024 Tribeca Competition. Roco Movies releases “Sabbath Queen” on November 22.
Amichai Lau-Lavie desires to get contained in the system of Judaism like a virus. A Radical Faerie, a drag queen, a rabbi, and an overtly homosexual man, Amichai is the main focus of Sandi DuBowski’s bold documentary “Sabbath Queen,” filmed over twenty years. Amichai based a God-optional congregation that erupted established methods of apply in his non secular denomination — however the film follows Amichai right into a not-so-hairpin flip towards conservatism lately. “Sabbath Queen” finds filmmaker DuBowski skewing away from hagiography and as a substitute towards an energetic questioning of Amichai’s life’s work. Taking up a number of a long time of the person’s life means this movie loses its manner generally amid a scattered method, however “Sabbath Queen” shrewdly asks arduous questions on what it means to be Jewish within the twenty first century. Particularly when that query is so up for grabs proper now.
When you’re not hip to the particulars of Jewish life in America, particularly in New York Metropolis, “Sabbath Queen” might lose you at factors. However DuBowski doesn’t water down the movie’s method, and probably the most emotionally pungent side of his movie is inclusion of Amichai’s brother, Binyamin Lau, who has struggled with Amichai’s dedication to interrupt from custom all his life. “The closet is loss of life,” Amichai’s brother says because the film unpacks how Amichai left Israel within the Nineteen Nineties after being outed as homosexual within the media, solely to then arrive in New York Metropolis and undertake a drag persona he deployed throughout sermons.
The movie feels eerily prescient in the way in which it incorporates footage and testimony from Israel’s 2014 rocket assault on the Hamas-controlled Palestinian strip of Gaza. The footage and newsreels would possibly as properly have been taken yesterday. That’s contrasted towards the historical past of Amichai’s household as survivors of the Holocaust who had been additionally among the many earliest settlers in Israel. “Sabbath Queen” attracts the road from the fast delivery charge amongst Orthodox Jews to the eventual management of Benjamin Netanyahu, arguing that throughout the 30 years, Orthodox Judaism will make up many of the Jewish inhabitants. Amichai’s lifelong bristling towards his personal religion and in his sermonistic method to his teachings exhibits how he struggles with the crucial for Jews to uphold zionistic beliefs. Protest footage in New York exhibits native Jews difficult Amichai, who is just ever in a position to be himself.
Whereas Israel is the one nation within the Center East to acknowledge same-sex marriage, the nation stays not precisely hospitable to the idea as this movie reminds. Rabbinical testimony all through “Sabbath Queen” reveals combined emotions amongst Orthodox Jews towards the acceptance of LGBTQ folks and their marriages, which places Amichai completely in a spot of discontent and dysfunction as an out homosexual man himself.
DuBowski’s final function as a director, “Trembling Earlier than G-d,” queried the tensions between Orthodox Judaism and homosexuality, and “Sabbath Queen” looks like an extension of that investigation. Again in New York Metropolis, Amichai is a graduate of Manhattan’s Jewish Theological Seminary, often known as a traditionalist stronghold for the Jewish religion. However Amichai insists he got here of age out of these teachings to grow to be a “virus” meant to contaminate the system. How a lot has he embraced that very same system now?
His pop-up synagogue, which stresses a God-optional method to faith, has upset a lot of his contemporaries. “Sabbath Queen” particulars his coming to being in New York starting within the late Nineteen Nineties; there’s a lover who died of AIDS-related problems, and one which continues to hang-out him. These private asides are probably the most intriguing components of DuBowski’s movie, piercingly emotional when it’s keen to get contained in the darkest recesses of Amichai’s life.
“Sabbath Queen” at occasions feels overstuffed in its method to unpeeling the layers on a thirty ninth technology ex-Orthodox rabbi, usually leaving his drag queen persona (a hilarious one) within the mud. 4 editors on the movie work with an enormous deal of fabric because the film careens throughout concepts, at one level incorporating animation that feels much less fleshed-out than the live-action footage round it. DuBowski’s movie strikes at a breakneck tempo monitoring the divides between the Western liberalism Amichai got here to style as his id, and the traditional orthodoxy that gained’t warmly settle for him. He finally ends up someplace between the 2, in a liminal house that disturbs folks corresponding to his brother.
DuBowski’s activist portrait “Sabbath Queen” is overwhelmingly bold in its time-spanning, as looking out and curious as its major topic. We don’t depart the film with a agency sense of who Amichai is past his non secular backdrop, however I believe that’s the purpose: Who he’s as an individual has grow to be muddled and snarled with the one he’s speculated to symbolize.
Grade: B
“Sabbath Queen” premiered on the 2024 Tribeca Competition. Roco Movies releases it on November 22.