Having already seen and loved Haim Tabakman’ Eyes Wide Open, I watched Pink Lady, expecting it to address the problem of homophobia within the ultra-Orthodox Jewish community in the same way, by gently showing that the love between two men can be as beautiful and as powerful as the love between a man and a woman. But Pink Lady turned out to be different. Most movies give you their point upfront, while others make you think it’s about a specific topic, then reveal that the story is about something else. Pink Lady belongs somewhere in the middle of those two categories.
Written by Mindi Ehrlich, who has lived in and left that environment, and directed by Nir Bergman, Pink Lady follows a devout ultra-Orthodox woman called Bati (Nur Fibak), whose life takes a turn for the worse when she discovers that her husband, Lazer (Uri Blufarb), is being blackmailed and tormented by their religious community because he’s a closeted gay man. Desperate to save their marriage and fix him, she resorts to all sorts of available methods to make him desire her. But the more the plot unfolds, the more it becomes clear that this isn’t a movie about a gay man trapped inside a deeply conservative religious community and a wife who’s been betrayed. It is also about a woman discovering that she has been trapped too.
Backed up by powerful performances from both actors, the film shows that Bati and Lazer are cornered into playing a role for appearances’ sake. Lazer is expected to deny his sexuality and be the heterosexual, religious husband, while Bati, who has only ever been taught to be modest, obedient, and a good wife, is expected to know how to please her husband without ever really having been taught anything about her own sexuality.
That becomes obvious when Bati finds a pink wig in a porn magazine that a rabbi has given Lazer in an attempt to cure his homosexuality. Believing that the wig might help her become desirable enough for her husband to want her, she orders one. And suddenly, the two of them are simulating for each other, but most importantly, for their community. She is trying to become desirable enough to make him heterosexual. He is trying to become heterosexual enough to remain acceptable.
Pink Lady is much more than a story about homophobia. It is about what happens when people are given a role before they are given the chance to figure out who they actually are or what they want. Lazer’s sexuality cracks open the marriage, but once that happens, Bati starts seeing the walls around herself too. They’re everywhere: in the rules governing her body, in her ignorance about sex, in the expectations placed on her as a wife, and in the assumption that it’s up to her to make her husband heterosexual.
The pink wig, which at first looks like an act of rebellion, is really just another costume that has been handed to her. It is not a symbol of liberation and freedom. It is actually the very thing that brings forward, under the spotlight, Bati and Lazer’s need to perform. And this performance is not for themselves; it’s for the community they live in. The presence of the wig only emphasizes their entrapment.
There are some scenes that will stay with me even if I eventually forget the details of the film. One of them is when Bati asks her friend, “Is this rape? Is what I’m doing to him rape?” That moment hit me like a punch in the gut. What makes it so powerful is that the realization comes from Bati herself. It’s the moment when she begins to look at herself from outside the role she has always been expected to play, and it’s when she finally understands her husband.
There is also a symmetry between Bati and Lazer’s experiences as a couple trying to save their marriage. She performs femininity so that he can perform heterosexuality. The more they try to act their way out of the problem, the more obvious it becomes that they both are trying to survive inside a world they were given but never really chose.
The pink wig starts out as a tool of seduction, but eventually it exposes just how artificial all of this is: the desire they’re trying to manufacture, the identities they’re trying to take, and the marriage they’re trying desperately to save. By the end, the wig doesn’t look like freedom anymore. It looks like a tool they use to help them become actors on the stage of their own lives.
