Pearl Gluck does the utmost to make her memoir-documentary Divan distractingly cutesy. She piles on video effects, making the footage scratchy-looking and sepia-toned when she's telling a story from the old country, and streaky and slow when she's examining her self-doubt. Her narration has a wry, conversational tone that film-festival attendees will immediately recognize as a common way that insecure documentarians suck up to audiences. Divan overcomes its stylistic clichés only because Gluck's story is rich, and because it comes to a knockout finish.
Divan is ostensibly about Gluck's attempt to track down a family heirloom—a couch upon which great rabbis have slept and studied—but the film develops into a breezy discussion of the value of religious artifacts, while also covering Gluck's personal journey as a woman raised Hasidic and trying to reclaim her traditions without sacrificing an independent mind. Gluck's family chides her for having a career instead of a husband, and even her non-Orthodox friends warn her that it's useless to feign conservatism in religion, because the generation after hers will pick up on her wishy-washiness. But Gluck takes comfort in the history of the Hasidic sect, which began as a radical offshoot and only later became hidebound. And she's certain that even if she can't deliver grandchildren, she can contribute to the family by returning her great-grandfather's couch.
Divan jumps around to include scenes of couch restoration, Gluck traveling through Hungary, people sharing Jewish legends and folktales, Gluck being criticized for her immodesty, sacred ceremonies (most of which Gluck is kicked out of when she's caught videotaping), and Gluck's friends swapping stories about what it cost them when they moved away from fundamentalism. The documentary carries on in the spirit of the recent Trembling Before G-d and My Architect, but it's not as contentious: As a result, Gluck's need to position herself as sweet and likable makes her examination of the pitfalls of orthodoxy too anecdotal and light.
But Divan reaches a moving, unexpected conclusion that takes all of Gluck's questions about how to be a part-time believer and finds a somewhat radical solution. The ending elevates the film, because for one final moment of clarity, she allows herself to be seen in a light that's natural, not just flattering.