This is the fiction feature debut from film-maker Eric Steel, previously responsible for the notorious documentary The Bridge, about people who kill themselves by jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge. Minyan is a subdued, withdrawn emotional drama set in the 1980s among the Russian Jewish immigrant community of New York’s “Little Odessa”. David (Samuel H Levine) is a young Jewish gay man who reads a lot of James Baldwin; he is at odds with his overbearing parents and much closer to his recently widowed grandfather Josef (Ron Rifkin) who has now got a modest but comfortable apartment in a much sought-after subsidised residency building for observant Jews. David comes to live there, too, both agreeing to make up the numbers required (the “minyan”) for public worship.
David can see that two of the older Jewish men in the building are in fact a couple, their relationship accepted on a don’t ask, don’t tell basis, but whose sexual identity has in formal terms been suppressed, or at any rate tacitly considered by them irrelevant in comparison with the horrors they lived through during the war, and the consequent need for loyalty to traditional Judaism. David’s Jewish identity is also at odds with his own concealed gay identity, and he has a passionate affair with handsome bartender Eric (Chris Perfetti) who is angry at David’s ignorance of the Aids crisis.
Steel brings a very distinctive kind of control and restraint to his film, both in terms of its subdued colour palette and an emotional language which despite explicit scenes of both sex and homophobic tension and paranoia, has something opaque and elliptical about it. The film however concludes with that now quaint rarity: the freeze-frame shot, which seems to belong to a lighter, more quizzically humorous film. Levine brings an assertive and intelligent performance.
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