Apr

11

2025

Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): The veteran French director Claude Lelouch is fond of quoting Willa Cather’s familiar line that “there are only two or three human stories, and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before.” Though he’s never specified what he takes these archetypal tales to be, his work makes clear that one of them is the meeting of two people fated to fall in love. Lelouch, still an active filmmaker at 87, is best known for his Oscar-winning 1966 film A Man and a Woman, one of the unquestioned classics of this infinitely fertile genre. This masterpiece has been restored and is now showing at New York’s Film Forum (along with several other works in a kind of mini-retrospective)—and which will be making the rounds of the country’s shrinking number of arthouse cinemas.

As the film’s title suggests, here Lelouch pares the genre down to its essentials. A handsome man (played by the debonair Jean-Louis Trintignant) meets a beautiful woman (the otherworldly Anouk Aimée); they discover and submit to their mutual attraction, the woman rebels against it, and then in the end, they realize it can’t be fought against. That’s the basis for half the films ever made, but A Man and a Woman stand out for the verisimilitude of an element that has all but vanished from film: conversation. Eric Rohmer may be the master of the intellectual discussion, but no director has portrayed the banal exchanges of those falling in love as convincingly as Lelouch. His lovers always seem to register the precise instant the spark is lit, and from that moment on their talk carries the same underlying message, no matter the venue or the ostensible subject. Indeed, in A Man and a Woman—in which the hero and heroine meet at their children’s school—the most striking conversation amoureuse occurs in the company of those children, in the shape of silly banter that ends up conveying much more.

Lelouch has always been fond of elaborate camera movement, and A Man and a Woman is famous for a shot in which the viewer circles the lovers as they embrace in the sands of the beach at Deauville, a simple and direct expression of the dizziness of early love. The lovers will soon hit a bump in the road, her past intruding on their shared present, but we remain confident they’ll ultimately overcome it all. An oft-told tale that has seldom been better told.

Cynthia Friedman (managing director): I had a blast watching Mickey 17, the latest movie of filmmaker Bong Joon Ho, who previously directed Parasite six years ago. Despite being someone who is constitutionally ill-equipped to handle horror movies, I had been compelled by the reviews I’d read of Parasite, and so I sought out a sturdy friend to accompany me to see it. I will never watch the movie again—my poor heart, and those terrifyingly suspenseful moments on screen—but it was superb.

Mickey 17 has been met with mixed reviews. I think some of these are in reaction to the film’s predecessor; people went into Mickey 17 hoping or expecting to experience another work of scathing social commentary executed with artistic prowess and almost mathematical precision. Mickey 17 is not that film. It retains Ho’s comedic timing and absurdist tendencies, but is wackier and weirder. Given Ho’s backing from a major studio and the essentially carte blanche he received after the wide acclaim, awards, and box office success of Parasite, one gets the sense that, this time, he decided to follow a topic he was curious about, and play around with it. Imagine if one of the stranger movies you had ever seen had a $118 million budget, phenomenal cinematography and sound design, and its pick of any cast member it wanted—you’re probably close to imagining what Mickey 17 is like. And indeed, watching the high-quality version of someone’s pet project is a treat.

The titular Mickey, played by Robert Pattinson, signs up to be an “expendable” on a space mission, in a world about 30 years into the future in which scientists have figured out human cloning but the technology is only allowed extraterrestrially, to skirt ethical concerns. Pattinson has come a long way from my primary association with him—an emotionless, sparkling vampire in the Twilight series, circa my young adulthood—and his acting and narration make the 137-minute film feel dynamic and funny pretty much the entire way through. (Some critics have pointed to a messy third act; I see their argument but it didn’t dampen my experience.) Mickey is kind of an idiot, but he’s so earnest that it’s hard not to be endeared. The other main characters we meet are also entertaining: Steven Yeun as Mickey’s grifter friend, whose hijinks led to Mickey’s decision to leave earth to begin with; Mark Ruffalo and Toni Colette as a power-hungry and uncomfortably affectionate couple who take their fanatic followers to a new planet after political failure; and Naomi Ackie as Mickey’s smart, willful girlfriend, whose possessiveness over Mickey takes on new meaning as the story progresses. The film engages some ethical questions—around such themes as bodily autonomy, labor exploitation, and ecosystem colonization—but these questions act as fodder for the characters’ exploration of their own internal quandaries and failures, more than as sharp commentary on particular issues.

While Mickey 17 is sci-fi, rather than horror, you still might want to find someone to lean on in the theater; I must have turned to look at my friend and said, “What the?!?!” at least five times in the first 30 minutes. But if you go into the film in the mood to be along for the ride, it’s bound to be a fun one.

Naomi Gordon-Loebl (deputy publisher): Over the course of the week I spent reading Yael van der Wouden’s 2024 debut novel The Safekeep, I kept trying to recommend it to people—my friends at a dinner party, my mother and grandmother during a family visit, my coworkers on Slack. I wanted everyone to read the novel that I was living inside of, unable to think beyond. But The Safekeep, as it turns out, is one of those books that is nearly impossible to describe without giving away key plot points. “What’s it about?” would come the very reasonable question. “Well . . . it’s about a woman . . . who lives alone in postwar Holland . . .” It’s not exactly a riveting sell.

This is what I can say: The Safekeep is gripping. It’s also queer, and it’s also hot. And it epitomizes the era of queer fiction we have blessedly entered into: As we move away from the Obergefell-tinged pressure to represent queer love as a wholesome, morally unimpeachable fairytale, we are finally talking about the more interesting things that queer relationships, like all human relationships, can be—dark, ugly, sexy, scary, twisted, and complicated.

The Safekeep is set in 1961, in a society that is trying to piece itself back together when the markers of what tore it apart are still everywhere. It seems to me no accident that the book came out in 2024, a year in which the world wrestled, desperately and perhaps fruitlessly, with similar questions around culpability and justice. But The Safekeep does not take place in a courtroom or some other space of geopolitical reckoning; it takes place in a single house in the countryside, and the story unfolds between two individual women, both of whom are flawed, human, and too complex to reduce to simple moral binaries. I’ll be thinking about this book for a long time—which is a sign, I think, that van der Wouden has gotten something right.

Famously, matzah plays a key role in the biblical narrative of the Israelites’ exodus from Egypt, back in Shemot. We all know the story: The Israelites, in a rush to leave Egypt, didn’t have time to let their bread rise—they “could not delay; nor had they prepared any provisions for themselves,” the Torah tells us, and so they set off on their desert trek with just the unleavened fare we know today. But this week’s parshah, Tzav, provides us with a much lesser-known biblical reference to matzah: the sacrificial rituals of the Tabernacle and Temple. The text instructs the people that anything left over after sacrificing the meal offering “shall be eaten by Aaron and his sons; it shall be eaten as matzot, in the sacred precinct; they shall eat it in the enclosure of the Tent of Meeting. It shall not be baked with hametz [leaven].” It’s striking that a form of matzah—and not simply unleavened bread, but unleavened bread that cannot be combined with hametz, the ingredient that is forbidden to eat during Passover—is so central to the sacrificial service. During the seder, then, when we eat matzah, we not only reenact the Exodus; we also reenact an element of the Temple service.

We might consider this doubleness in relation to matzah’s status as a bread of dichotomies. Traditionally, matzah is understood as both the “bread of affliction” and the “bread of freedom.” In a famous Talmudic debate, the rabbis draw on a biblical reference to matzah as “lechem oni”—literally, “the bread of poverty”—and pun on “oni” with the word “onin,” which means “to answer,” dubbing matzah the bread “that prompts us to speak about it.” In the context of the seder, speech is the opposite of slavery; the ability to go on and on about the story of our liberation is thus diametrically opposed to the conditions of enslavement. And so, as the Women’s Seder Sourcebook puts it, matzah as both the bread of affliction and the bread of discursive freedom means that when we eat matzah, we “taste both slavery and redemption in a single bite.” So what might we gain from viewing matzah through the doubleness of its role in the Exodus and in the rituals of the Temple? Perhaps that the bread can prompt us to hold together change, surprise, and revelation, on the one hand, with consistency and steady ritual on the other. After all, the Tabernacle and Temple and their attendant services are, in Jewish memory, representative of stability, agency, and power.

But these associations also point toward another generative layer of doubleness. The newly liberated Israelites are immediately tasked with building the Tabernacle, casting it as the inversion of the kind of labor done while in slavery. The building of these grand structures—filled with gold, silver, and fine cloths—bears little resemblance to the bricks they were once forced to make in Egypt. In this sense, the Temple and Tabernacle represent something very different from what we generally think of as Passover’s core themes. The seder invites its participants to alternately identify with the experiences of oppression and of liberation from oppression; notably, both of these seemingly opposite ideas are about dependency rather than agency. Matzah, viewed through the lens of oppression and liberation, represents human need. To bring the Temple’s symbolism to the seder through the added meaning it gives to the matzah means contemplating not only our dependency but also the agency with which we shape the world.

Though the Temple is a reminder of our past power, it is also a reminder of the destruction that can befall us when we act unjustly. In this way, even as the Temple symbolizes the magnificence we can create with our own hands, it also functions as a warning that, unless it is guided and checked by our obligations to others, power will inevitably turn to devastation. This year, as we eat our matzah, let us reflect not only on our liberation but on those commitments and the terrible consequences of neglecting them—and on the responsibility and power we have to work toward the liberation of others.

Avigayil Halpern is a rabbi and writer based in Washington, DC, whose work focuses on feminist and queer Torah. Read more of her writing here.