Amichai Lau-Lavie needs to get contained in the system of Judaism like a virus. A Radical Faerie, a drag queen, a rabbi, and an overtly homosexual man, Amichai is the main focus of Sandi DuBowski’s bold documentary “Sabbath Queen,” filmed over twenty years. Amichai based a God-optional congregation that erupted established programs of observe in his spiritual denomination — however the film follows Amichai right into a not-so-hairpin flip towards conservatism in recent times. “Sabbath Queen” finds filmmaker DuBowski skewing away from hagiography and as a substitute towards an energetic questioning of Amichai’s life’s work. Taking up a number of a long time of the person’s life means this movie loses its method generally amid a scattered method, however “Sabbath Queen” shrewdly asks arduous questions on what it means to be Jewish within the twenty first century. Particularly when that query is so up for grabs proper now.
In case you’re not hip to the particulars of Jewish life in America, particularly in New York Metropolis, “Sabbath Queen” could lose you at factors. However DuBowski doesn’t water down the movie’s method, and essentially the most emotionally pungent side of his movie is inclusion of Amichai’s brother, Binyamin Lau, who has struggled with Amichai’s dedication to interrupt from custom all his life. “The closet is demise,” Amichai’s brother says because the film unpacks how Amichai left Israel within the Nineties after being outed as homosexual within the media, solely to then arrive in New York Metropolis and undertake a drag persona he deployed throughout sermons.
The movie feels eerily prescient in the best way it incorporates footage and testimony from Israel’s 2014 rocket assault on the Hamas-controlled Palestinian strip of Gaza. The footage and newsreels would possibly as effectively have been taken yesterday. That’s contrasted in opposition to the historical past of Amichai’s household as survivors of the Holocaust who had been additionally among the many earliest settlers in Israel. “Sabbath Queen” attracts the road from the speedy delivery charge amongst Orthodox Jews to the eventual management of Benjamin Netanyahu, arguing that inside the 30 years, Orthodox Judaism will make up many of the Jewish inhabitants. Amichai’s lifelong bristling in opposition to his personal religion and in his sermonistic method to his teachings exhibits how he struggles with the crucial for Jews to uphold zionistic beliefs. Protest footage in New York exhibits native Jews difficult Amichai, who is just ever capable of be himself.
Whereas Israel is the one nation within the Center East to acknowledge same-sex marriage, the nation stays not precisely hospitable to the idea as this movie reminds. Rabbinical testimony all through “Sabbath Queen” reveals blended emotions amongst Orthodox Jews towards the acceptance of LGBTQ folks and their marriages, which places Amichai completely in a spot of discontent and dysfunction as an out homosexual man himself.
DuBowski’s final characteristic as a director, “Trembling Earlier than G-d,” queried the tensions between Orthodox Judaism and homosexuality, and “Sabbath Queen” seems like an extension of that investigation. Again in New York Metropolis, Amichai is a graduate of Manhattan’s Jewish Theological Seminary, often known as a traditionalist stronghold for the Jewish religion. However Amichai insists he got here of age out of these teachings to develop into a “virus” meant to contaminate the system. How a lot has he embraced that very same system now?
His pop-up synagogue, which stresses a God-optional method to faith, has upset a lot of his contemporaries. “Sabbath Queen” particulars his coming to being in New York starting within the late Nineties; there’s a lover who died of AIDS-related problems, and one which continues to hang-out him. These private asides are essentially the most intriguing components of DuBowski’s movie, piercingly emotional when it’s keen to get contained in the darkest recesses of Amichai’s life.
“Sabbath Queen” at occasions feels overstuffed in its method to unpeeling the layers on a thirty ninth technology ex-Orthodox rabbi, usually leaving his drag queen persona (a hilarious one) within the mud. 4 editors on the movie work with an unlimited deal of fabric because the film careens throughout concepts, at one level incorporating animation that feels much less fleshed-out than the live-action footage round it. DuBowski’s movie strikes at a breakneck tempo monitoring the divides between the Western liberalism Amichai got here to trend as his id, and the traditional orthodoxy that gained’t warmly settle for him. He finally ends up someplace between the 2, in a liminal house that disturbs folks resembling his brother.
DuBowski’s activist portrait “Sabbath Queen” is overwhelmingly bold in its time-spanning, as looking out and curious as its main topic. We don’t go away the film with a agency sense of who Amichai is past his spiritual backdrop, however I feel that’s the purpose: Who he’s as an individual has develop into muddled and snarled with the one he’s speculated to symbolize.
Grade: B
“Sabbath Queen” premiered on the 2024 Tribeca Pageant. It’s at present in search of U.S. distribution.