maurice_yacowar Review of Leona

Leona (2018)

Mexican Jewish woman loses gentile lover from community and family pressure

[9/10 · 6 August 2019]

In his debut film director Isaac Cherem uses a young woman's coming of age to probe the tension between insulation and assimilation in the Jewish community of Mexico City. When Ariela dates a gentile man the Jewish community and her family assume the responsibility to stave off her possible loss to them. Shamed by her venture, she is banished by both parents, now living separate lives, and even her grandmother. This family pressure is buttressed by the community's history and need for interdependence and renewal. Ariela is a talented mural painter. That is, she finds her self-expression on large outdoor spaces. Not for her the subdued, private paintings of easel and canvas. She wants to be out there. Committed to humanity, she fills the space with faces, amid elegant flourishes. That spirit enables her to take the gentile Ivan as a lover, though ultimately she can't meet his need to meet her family. Ivan is more respectful of her work than her Jewish lover is. Gabriel presumes she would rather slip into domesticity. But then, Ivan comes from an artistic family, Gabriel from merchants. Still, Ivan sleeps through his father's production of King Lear and won't attend his Romeo and Juliet, which would now be too personal. Ariela's intervening suitors are even more inappropriate, Jewish but vulgarians. Honouring the community pressure, Gabriel courts Ariela's family more than he does her. He clears their marriage with them before he asks her. At their first bedding, her upside-down view of his collection of National Football League memorabilia should have warned her off more completely. The NFL-nerd bowler wins her family but not her. She tries to recover Ivan by painting a mural of his tattoo - "Looking sensational." But now he has a beautiful new girlfriend, Sofia, whom she meets at his friends' engagement barbecue. The narrative is framed by two mikvahs. The first is the formal Jewish ceremony in which her friend is ceremonially bathed in preparation for her wedding. While the friend proceeds into child-rearing, Ariela moves from her passion - which isolates her from her family and the community - through the inapt Gabriel, finally resigning herself to the solitude of independence. In the last shot she immerses herself in her tub alone, an asocial alternative to the mikvah. She will make her own way, choose her own loves, find her own purification, rather than serve her community's will and ritual. In that spirit she signs her new mural Leona, which is Spanish for the "lioness" her Hebrew name Ariela denotes. In name as in spirit, the lioness leaves the herd.