Review of 51 Birch Street (2006) by Jean-Francois V — 23 Sep 2008

A producer and director of documentary films, Doug Block turns his camera on his own parents, Mike and Mina. The latter is warm and talkative, the former benevolent but rather withdrawn, secretive and difficult to relate to. It is obvious who Block feels closer to.

But then tragedy strikes. Mina catches pneumonia and dies within a fortnight. And no more than four months later, Mike has reconnected with a secretary he knew decades earlier, has married her, and is selling the family house on 51 Birch Street to move to Florida and live with his new wife.

The film documents Block's gradual discovery of his parents' marital secrets through his interviews with his father, siblings and family friends, and, more.

Importantly, the reading of three full boxes of his mother's obsessively self-absorbed diaries.

"51 Birch Street" is an interesting story of the marital problems of two atheistic Jews (Mike declares himself "within the Humanistic tradition", and Mina was the sexually emancipated, pot-smoking peace.

Activist), who happened to get married in 1947, right as Kinsey was engineering the sexual revolution in America (his name is not mentioned in the film, but the man must have been behind Mina's reoccupation with "orgasm" and "fellatio", two words highlighted by her son in her diary), and who fell prey to the influence.

Of the personal Saviour and Redeemer of the modern atheistic Jew: the psychoanalyst ("Everybody falls in.

Love with their therapist", a lady friend comments at one point.).

As a family mystery, the film is worth watching, just like an episode of the British genealogy series "Who Do You Think You Are?", but I wish Block had tried to delve into the broader socio-cultural currents that impacted on his parents' marriage. Being himself a modern atheistic Jew who shares his parents' basic outlook (he describes himself as "not that religious" and turns to a psychoanalyst for answers), he is only critical of the traditional gender roles and expectations of the 40's and 50's, which bear the blame for whatever may have gone wrong in his parents' marriage, and is very casual about the pathologies of our era - such as drugs, divorce and adultery.