Shira Haas as Esty in Unorthodox (Netflix)
For the Summer 2020 issue of Sight & Sound, I reviewed the Netflix series Unorthodox. Review posted with permission.
“I’m different from the other girls,” says 19-year-old Esty (Shira Haas), protagonist of the four-part Netflix drama Unorthodox. This difference is the engine of a remarkable story that makes Esty many things. Inspired by Deborah Feldman’s memoir, the series follows her as she flees her cloistered Ultra-Orthodox Hassidic Brooklyn community and travels to Berlin, where she knows no one and nothing, to start again. Her husband Yanky (Amit Rahav) and his cousin Moishe (Jeff Wilbusch) are in pursuit while a chance meeting with students at a musical conservatory seems to offer a possible platform for a new start. Her estranged mother is somewhere in the city too.
Esty, then, is at once daring fugitive, fish-out-of-water ingénue and writer of her own destiny. Writers Anna Wagner and Alexa Karolinski and director Maria Schrader handle this balancing act with confidence. While there’s an effective undertow of dramatic suspense throughout – will Yanky and Moishe succeed in retrieving her? – the focus remains on the extraordinary psychological tensions that structure Esty’s journey, quite fraught enough even without the occasional genre trappings of chases, break-ins and stand-offs. What really ups the stakes is the revelation that Esty is pregnant, throwing into relief the story’s central question of who and what human lives are for: vehicles of self-determination or facets of a bigger plan beyond individual agency or indeed human understanding?
Unorthodox deftly balances two settings, distributing its time between Esty’s new life in Berlin and the community she left behind, where scenes are set both in the present and in the year or so before her flight, during which her marriage is arranged. It’s an unprecedented depiction of the life of Williamsburg’s Satmar Jews, a Yiddish-speaking community established by Hungarian Holocaust survivors. The show attends both to its grand structures (faith, tradition, gender roles) and its minutiae (dress, food, shopping, eating, matchmaking), with an interest in procreation central to both. “We’re rebuilding the six million lost,” Esty notes at one point. The extended depiction of Esty and Yanky’s wedding day stands out as a tour de force in this regard.
Berlin, meanwhile, is all smartphones, kissing in public, ham sandwiches, nightclubs, multidimensional multiculturalism, red lipstick called Epiphany… It’s a site of profound culture shock for Esty, while the mere idea of going to Germany is anathema to her community. The city emerges as a place of both dizzying opportunity and disturbing crassness, a place where Jews, Muslims and Christians perform music together but where the Holocaust – still a matter of living memory – can seem reduced to a backdrop for narcissistic selfies.
Such complexities play out with great power in the figure of Esty. Haas makes her seem younger even than her teenage years but balances childlike vulnerability – at one point she literally leaps into the arms of a maternal character – with a seriously strong will and propensity to bold opportunism. Much of this relates to a crisis around Esty’s failure to do Satmar womanhood successfully: unconvincing as a traditional daughter or housewife or mother-to-be, she determines to find space to explore other modes. Notably, while she is physically pursued by men, it’s women who both wear her down with expectation and conspire to help her escape.
Music occupies a central role in the story, supplying motifs of both belonging and yearning. An early scene establishes a bond between Esty and her grandmother predicated on appreciation of a Schubert lied: at once a shared joy and an emblem of inequality because of the prohibition on women performing music in public, itself representative of a taboo on female agency and self-expression. In Williamsburg, Esty took piano lessons in secret and many of her significant Berlin experiences involve music, from sneaking into classical performances to visiting her first nightclub; her hopes of a new life are pinned on the prospect of an audition to the conservatory where her new acquaintances study. As in Levan Akin’s recent feature And Then We Danced, emancipation is linked to the opportunity to be witnessed performing on one’s own terms.
It’s through her new friendships that a new Esty tentatively emerges, though they are not simply pleasurable encounters and her new self is not simply liberated. She literally sheds the accoutrements of her orthodox life during a trip to swim and sunbathe at Wannsee, where the final solution was plotted; as Esty’s wig floats away, we’re invited to consider whether freedom demands forgetting. Considerations of identity and memory, individualism and tradition, inheritance and erasure can’t easily be harmoniously arranged or resolved, and it’s to the show’s credit that it doesn’t pretend they can. At one point, Esty is reminded that Berlin is heavy with the souls of the exterminated. “The dead are with us anyway,” she replies. “It doesn’t matter where we live.” The challenge, perhaps, is to find a way to honour them while honouring oneself.
