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A Price Above Rubies

1998, Movie, R, 120 mins

A Price Above Rubies: Review

PRICE ABOVE RUBIES, A
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Ambitious, unusual and bitterly disappointing, this offbeat drama about a young woman torn between the demands of a strict religious community and her own desires lacks the devastatingly subtle emotional depth that made writer-director Boaz Yakin's first film, FRESH, such a powerful experience. Raised within Jewish Orthodox traditions, Sonia (Renee Zellweger) is restless and confused, unsure of her place in the world despite her religion's strict and precise teachings about a woman's ambitions and obligations. Married to promising young scholar Mendel (Glenn Fitzgerald) and the mother of a new baby, Sonia is plagued by intensely passionate, sensual emotions and sensations that perplex and frighten her. Mendel's brother Sender (Christopher Eccleston), a jeweler, offers her a job buying pieces for his business, and she leaps at the freedom it offers. But the job comes at a price, driving a wedge between Sonia and Mendel, Sonia and her extended family and, finally, Sonia and her community. Yakin's portrait of the Hasidim is certainly more convincing than Sidney Lumet's in A STRANGER AMONG US, but there's something extremely unconvincing about Sonia's reaction to her forbidden stirrings, particularly an erotic kiss that shocks her devout sister-in-law (Juliana Margulies) into personally escorting Sonia to rabbinical counseling. The notion of a woman tormented by repressed sexual desire so explosive that it overrides every scrap of common sense she possesses owes more to pornographic fantasy than psychological insight. The film's touches of magic realism are also jarring: Sonia's brother Yossi (Shelton Dane), who drowned when they were children, appears periodically and speaks with her, and Sonia has a series of encounters with a mysterious older woman (Kathleen Chalfant), whose colorful shoulders apparently bear the symbolic weight of all difficult women. Yakin's intentions are laudable, but in this case his achievements don't quite measure up. leave a comment --Maitland McDonagh
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