Imagine that you’re in a marriage where love is gone. You’ve been in the relationship for many years, and decided that it’s time to live separately. Your spouse agrees, and for the past few years you’ve been living with your sister. Now comes the time to get a legal divorce, as you are married and want to move on with your life, be free from this bind, perhaps even start dreaming about seeing someone new. However, your spouse for some reason won’t grant you the divorce. Court date after court date, they won’t show up. This purgatory is the premise of the film Gett: The Trial of Viviane Amsalem.
In Israel, marriage and divorce are not governed by civil law but by religious authority. Jewish couples fall under the jurisdiction of the rabbinical courts, and a divorce, called a gett, is a document that can only be finalized when the husband agrees to give it. The wife can request it, argue for it, wait years for it, but she cannot compel it. Without her husband’s consent, she remains legally married, regardless of how long they’ve been separated or how mutual the desire to part.
Gett takes place almost entirely within the grey walls of a rabbinical courtroom, across five years of hearings. We follow Viviane Amsalem, played by Ronit Elkabetz, as she returns again and again before a panel of three rabbis, her husband Elisha sitting across from her, unmoved. The setting is deliberately spare, almost airless, and yet the film never feels static. The camera stays close, particularly on Viviane’s face, which almost becomes the film’s focal point. Waves of exhaustion, fury, hope and humiliation pass through her eyes in a single shot.
Ronit Elkabetz wrote the film together with her brother Shlomi, and this is the third part of a trilogy they built around Viviane. It begins with “To Take a Wife” (2004) and continues with “Shiva” (2007). Writing and performing the lead role gives the film an unusual gravitas. Ronit Elkabetz’s performance is full of emotion and restrained at the same time, a combination that is very hard to pull off. It’s a very personal film to me, and I’m sure to many other women as well, because it manages to pin point the exquisite pain of having your freedom taken away from you.
The power of the rabbinical institution is portrayed through an accumulation of scenes, a building of tension that occurs through the entire film. We watch witness after witness take the stand and talk around Viviane’s life, her choices, her personality, as if she is evidence rather than a person. The rabbis are not portrayed as villains. They are men doing their jobs within a system they did not invent, occasionally even expressing sympathy. And somehow that is more unsettling than if they were simply cruel.
Gett received critical acclaim, was selected as Israel’s entry for the Academy Awards in 2015, and was even nominated for a Golden Globe. Unfortunately, Ronit Elkabetz passed away in 2016 at the age of 51 from cancer, before she could see just how far the film’s reach would go. Her absence is still felt, but her body of work stands as her legacy and continues to resonate, especially Gett. Gett took something many women live through privately and put it, plainly and unflinchingly, on screen. Watching it reminds me of the power art has to reflect, challenge, and sometimes even change reality.
