MOVIE REVIEW : Battle in a Spiritual Arena

In “The Quarrel” (Laemmle’s Sunset 5), passion and principle collide memorably. It’s an excellent little film, with a deceptively simple story about two old enemies/friends who meet unexpectedly after 15 years’ separation in a Montreal park on Rosh Hashanah. But its implications are large. Like the Jewish culture it tries to encapsulate in barely an hour and a half, this film balances philosophical issues with the warmer, earthier bonds of life.

Mostly it succeeds. Though “The Quarrel” is primarily a two-character piece, it has crisp, lively images, a compulsive drive and tension. When the combative central pair, Hersh Rasseyner (Saul Rubinek) and Chaim Kovler (R. H. Thomson), meet, it’s as if by spooky predestination. When they first walk off together into the crisp green day, they look dazed. We can tell it’s no conventional reunion; all their defenses are down immediately.

Now a rabbi and a Yiddish-language novelist/advice columnist, Hersh and Chaim are both Holocaust survivors. Though best friends as children, they parted badly, in the midst of a violent argument. Now, despite their best intentions, the argument keeps rising again. They reminisce on the past; one of them strikes a nerve; they quarrel; the squall stops; it explodes anew.

Chaim is tall, neat and bespectacled, Hersh short and fuzzy-bearded, and they know each other so well they can top each other’s sentences and jokes. They spend the day this way, wrangling and reminiscing, embracing and battling, moving together through sunshine and rainstorm. And it’s obvious that though they love each other still, they also can hate, and are bound together by something stronger than either. By their common roots in the destroyed town of Bialystock? By their heritage? By the memory of the Holocaust? By the quarrel itself?

Like all good dramas, “The Quarrel” doesn’t yield up its answers easily. Based on a short story by Chaim Grade, adapted by David Brandes and directed by Eli Cohen, it sets up Herz as religion’s fiery representative, Chaim as the urbane skeptic and humanist.

The schism here is a crucial one, both psychological and spiritual. There’s a personal rivalry. Herz was the yeshiva head’s son, Chaim the top student and teacher’s pet. And something much deeper as well, as Herz explains himself. When Chaim looks at people, he sees them as good, and reason as a tool of light, while Herz sees people as full of evil that must be restrained--not by reason, but by religion, laws, tradition.

All of this is thrown into focus by the Holocaust, which took their families, wives and most of their friends. But, for Chaim, the butchery of Nazism is proof of God’s silence. For Herz, it signifies that sin still lives.

Rubinek and Thomson worked together before, in the 1982 Canadian cult-deprogramming sleeper “Ticket to Heaven.” Wonderful actors, they have immense on-screen rapport. Here, they’ve summoned up a symphony of gestures and their interplay is constantly deft and alive, filled with complex affection, fierce advocacy, incongruous empathy.

Their director, Cohen, made “Ricochets,” a fine, grimly realistic Israeli war film. In “The Quarrel” (Times-rated: Family), he depicts men in battle again: a war of the spirit on a battleground of ideas. Yet, our final sense isn’t of intellectual bloodletting. It’s of mutual yearning for the light, for peace. And for that comforting late-afternoon wind through the trees that suggests a temporary shelter from all darkness outside.

‘The Quarrel’

Saul Rubinek: Hersh Rasseyner

R. H. Thomson: Chaim Kovler

Ellen Cohen: Freda

Ari Snyder: Rosenberg

An American Playhouse Theatrical Films/Atlantis Releasing presentation of an Atlantis Films Limited/Apple & Honey production, in association with Comweb Productions, the Ontario Film Development Corp. and Super Ecran, released by Apple & Honey Film Corp. Director Eli Cohen. Producer-screenwriter David Brandes. Co-producer Kim Todd. Executive producers Peter Sussman, Paul Bronfman, Lindsay Law. Associate producer-playwright Joseph Telushkin. Cinematographer John Berrie. Editor Havelock Gradidge. Costumes Francois Barbeau. Music William Goldstein. Production design Michael Joy. Running time: 1 hour, 28 minutes.

Times-rated: Family.