Joan Micklin Silver’s Hester Street is a distinctly ’70s-era mix of stylistic sparseness and thematic revisionism. Set in Manhattan’s Lower East Side in 1896, the film, with its striking black-and-white imagery, recalls photographs taken by Jacob Riis around the same period of tenement housing and poverty. Silver’s period detail, though, isn’t merely a gesture of verisimilitude, but a means to gear the narrative toward the perspective and interests of women. As such, while Hester Street retains the visual style of images past, its social orientation is decidedly present-tense and feminist.
Hester Street, at heart, is a simple story of assimilation. A Russian Jewish woman, Gitl (Carol Kane), has immigrated to New York with her young son, Yossele (Paul Freedman), to reunite with her husband, Jake (Steven Keats). Gitl, though, has become too foreign for Jake, who’s been in the States for three years and is now taken with Mamie (Dorrie Kavanaugh), who projects Jake’s idea of an American woman in a way that Gitl cannot.
In a particularly harrowing scene, Jake tries to tear Gitl’s curly hair from her head. She cries in response: “It doesn’t come off! It’s my own hair!” The notion of removing visible evidence of one’s status as an immigrant consumes Jake (formerly named Yankel), to the extent that he demands they change their son’s name to Joey. The way Silver’s film sees him, Jake doesn’t want to be an American so much as he wants to erase his Jewishness out of unconscious self-loathing, which manifests as resentment and violence toward other Jews around him.
There’s an implicit academicism to Silver’s approach, and it impedes the film’s attempt to burrow inside of its characters as flesh-and-blood people. The camera often keeps its distance, hovering above or at a remove from characters as they occupy or move through space. And while there are a number of confrontations that progress toward Gitl and Jake considering a divorce, there’s a stylistic tension between the broader melodramatic story beats and the Silver’s overall approach, which leans toward an oversimplified realism throughout.
Still, the film retains a certain power in its unfolding, particularly through Kane’s grounded performance as a woman who’s entrapped by her husband’s irrational disgust with both her and himself. “Back home, he loved me,” she says at one point, and it’s clear in such a moment that Silver’s intent is to articulate how place fundamentally affects psychology and behavior, particularly when one’s idea of that place could never be matched by its reality. There’s literally nothing that Gitl can do to satisfy Jake except to become someone else and adopt his neurosis as her own. That she finally doesn’t speaks both to Silver’s feminist perspective and her adamancy that assimilation need not be a process of erasure but of enrichment.
Image/Sound
The 4K restoration scan on Cohen’s new Blu-ray gives cinematographer Kenneth Van Sickle’s images the luster that they deserve, with indoor sequences being particularly notable for the level of visible detail across the scope of the frame. Contrast is consistent throughout, and there are no signs of any image defects, suggesting a meticulous restoration effort. The 2.0 DTS-HD master audio track sounds excellent, balancing music and dialogue in a clear mix that oscillates effortlessly between moments of silence and bursts of sound with precision.
Extras
The extras on this Blu-ray release are comprehensive and enlightening, particularly the archival commentary track featuring writer-director Joan Micklin Silver and producer Raphael Silver, who delve into their experiences working on a miniscule budget and offer their interpretations of various characters motivations and scenes. In two new interviews—conducted in 2020 at New York’s Quad Cinema shortly before her death—Silver further elaborates on the making of Hester Street and reflects on its enduring significance. Rounding out the disc is four archival interviews, an original opening title sequence and outtakes with audio commentary by author Daniel Kremer, and the film’s restoration trailer.
Overall
Joan Micklin Silver’s debut feature receives a sterling 4K Blu-ray transfer and a wealth of worthwhile extras from Cohen Media Group.
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