This unexpected and unconventional love story starts off with the most random of encounters when Felix a perpetual womaniser cannot stop himself hitting up the sad looking attractive Hassidic woman waiting with her baby to pick up her food order in a delicatessen. There is no reaction from her at all or any real connection between the two of them and we assume that is the full sum of it. Meira is a young wife trapped in her traditional Jewish marriage and although she is committed to her faith and actually likes her husband, she bitterly resents the fact that she is entrenched in a way of life in which she knows that she is not cut out for. Instead of being the obedient dutiful spouse who should be breeding a large family and settling down, she is surreptitiously taking birth control pills and having some fun on the side listening to the jazz and practising her art despite promising her frustrated husband that she would cease both.
Another chance meeting in the snow covered streets of the predominately Jewish quarter in Montreal where they both live, and Felix and Meira discover they have a common interest in art. It will take them longer to realise that they are also both floundering wretchedly unhappy in their own different worlds. Whilst Meira struggles with wanting to be free and single, Felix already something of a drifter, has been unsettled by the unreconciled differences he had with his wealthy distant father who had just died.
Although this is a contemporary story there is very much an old-fashioned feeling to it all mainly due to the whole traditional lifestyle that Miera is part off, right down to the gentle ineffectual way her husband physically attacks Felix once he discovers the affair. The wintry setting of a rather cold and forbidding looking Mile End area adds to the bleakness of their situations. It makes the whole concept of this originally unlikely seeming relationship become a reality when both of these two lonely souls sense the possibility that life need not be quite so empty. What may have started out simply as a diversion from their unhappy lives gradually evolves into a real romance once they both let their guards down and the chemistry kicks in.The remarkable aspect is that this burgeoning relationship is portrayed in an almost chaste manner on screen, but there are some powerful intimate moments such as when Meira tries on some tight fitting jeans for the first time, or when Felix eventually gently takes off Meira’s wig, which add such a fierce intensity. It is greatly helped by some remarkably compelling performances both from Hadas Yaron the young Israeli actress whose breakthrough role was as another Hassidic wife in the stunning ‘Fill The Void’ and also from Martin Dubreuil an experienced actor who is little known outside his native Canada (although this movie will change all that). The pair so convincingly capture the essence of these two unfulfilled strangers who finally discover some purpose and happiness in this forbidden friendship which turns into something far beyond what either had dreamed off.
Credit also to French-Canadian writer/director Maxime Giroux for among other things making Meira’s abandoned husband such a accepting character that despite his bitterness/sadness at losing his wife showing that he genuinely loved he and truly wanted her to be happy even if in the end it meant leaving him. It was a refreshing twist to the plot.
Felix & Meira is a very melancholic love story and even when the couple are finally together there is still this fine veil of sadness that never quite dissipates. It is though a really exquisite movie and utterly beautiful to watch evolve.
