Austeria

How differently different people can observe and embody a film. An earlier review finds this film distasteful and full of anti-semitism, yet I had the opposite reaction. I felt I was observing an Issac Beshevis Singer short story of the old world on the other side of those destructive wars of the 20th Century. I found the lives of these Jewish people on the cusp of WWI sympathetic, real and alive. The fact that human passions, lust or longing fill their minds and hearts, at times, seems all too human. Yet, especially the inn keeper and the young man, they are also caring and sensitive souls who love and express this in various forms. The Hassidic are both profoundly spiritual and a bit absurd (to our secular eyes) dancing, singing and rejoicing even as the war comes closer to destroying the world they knew, which, as we know, was true. I found this vignette a touching, sensitive, wise portrayal of a moment in time that no longer exists, on the cusp of the end of an era. Rather than being anti-Jewish in any way, I found it an earthy and touching expression of that eastern European world that perished in time.