As soon as you‘ve read the premise of Nirvana Bergman’s endearing entry to Tallinn’s Black Nights Film Festival competition, Pink Lady, you feel like you know where it goes. For better or worse, it is precisely this place of placableness and prevalence that the tender tale of deception, desire, and doubt takes its audience. The latter is taken on an edifying but evasive excursion about social and self-imposed suppression whose religious roots are discretely denied. The director’s and screenwriter Mindi Ehrlich’s repeated reluctance to admit to and address that their character conflicts are inseparably linked to their fervent faith adds a curious imbalance to the psychological portraits.

In a weird way it almost seems the devout duplicity unknowingly shared by Bati (Nur Fibak) and her husband Lazar (Uri Blufarb) has leaped into the synecdochical story about their desperate attempts to adhere the draconian demands of their ultra-orthodox Jewish community. Its archaic applications forced the pious protagonist to burry any sexual passion underneath the ideal of a perfect housewife and mother. Meanwhile her husband struggles with his gayness, denying his true identity even as compromising photos threaten their financial stability as much as their mutual trust. As Bati starts to explore her own needs, both have to decide what they truly want in life.

For Lazar, this is what his faith deems acceptable; for Bati whose tool of self-discovery comes in the familiar trope of an open mined friend, it is being desired by Lazar. What their wishes have in common is a conscious und subconscious conformity to patriarchal principles the plot never dares to challenge. In a subtle but severe stance, the narrative reframes institutional abuse and clerical conversion concepts such as “corrective marriage” as unfortunate decisions of those forced into them. In more than one way, the ambiguous arc nerves allows its confined characters to grow to their full potential, neither personally nor dramatically.

Pink Lady premiered at this year’s Tallin Black Nights Film Festival.