Through the Wall

It’s often said that peo­ple will do any­thing for love. But how does plan­ning a wed­ding with­out a hus­band fit into that equa­tion? Israeli direc­tor Rama Burshtein’s Through the Wall sees charm­ing tra­gi-com­e­dy slip into Hol­ly­wood rom-com pre­dictabil­i­ty as Michal, a born-again Ortho­dox Jew liv­ing in Jerusalem, des­per­ate­ly seeks mar­riage and a spouse to com­plete her.

After her fiancé leaves, cit­ing his lack of love for her, she refus­es to aban­don the wed­ding plans and choos­es to go ahead with the cer­e­mo­ny on the agreed date in the hope that God will find the groom for her in the days before. Per­haps not the most con­ven­tion­al rom-com fare but Burshtein’s film has all the key tropes: a lone­ly hero­ine with dash­ing poten­tial suit­ors; her best friends to guide her through the dat­ing trau­ma. Michal’s faith in both God and the pow­er of love is test­ed as she prays to be rid of the despair and lone­li­ness that plagues her, fac­ing the social­ly-doomed prospect of a life lived alone.

With moments of humour and an endear­ing lead, the film is pleas­ant and straight­for­ward but, unfor­tu­nate­ly, doesn’t deliv­er much else. It fal­ters in places, main­ly due to the story’s foun­da­tion that its pro­tag­o­nist is unful­filled with­out a man and the director’s reluc­tance to crit­i­cise this assump­tion which is pos­si­bly based on her own rela­tion­ship with the Jew­ish Ortho­dox community.

Every aspect of Michal’s life seems to revolve around her mar­riage, from her lack of a prospec­tive hus­band to her suit­ably unap­peal­ing career as the own­er of a mobile pet­ting zoo, all visu­al­ly illus­trat­ed in the film by the fem­i­nine pinks and pur­ples in which she fre­quent­ly dress­es, or the flow­ers she is often framed by. There are hints at female sol­i­dar­i­ty in the form of the character’s clos­est friends, but the fiercest dia­logue all revolves around men or their lack of faith in her mar­riage madness.

New­com­er actress Noa Kol­er brings an ami­able sweet­ness to the lead char­ac­ter that cap­tures both the humour and tragedy of Burshstein’s script but the heavy reliance on this sin­gle actor to car­ry the entire film over­takes and wastes oppor­tu­ni­ties to explore the sup­port play­ers. The intro­duc­tions of the sug­gest­ed grooms, par­tic­u­lar­ly the Israeli pop­star Yoss (Oz Zehavi), she meets while on a pil­grim­age to the grave of the found­ing Hasidic Rab­bi in Ukraine, also feel rushed and under­de­vel­oped. Once Koler’s charm begins to wear thin it’s easy to become frus­trat­ed by a sto­ry that has the poten­tial to be so much more than a light roman­tic frolic.