A study of relationships couched in a quest

Pearl Gluck’s captivating film “Divan” merges her trip to Hungary as a Fulbright scholar with a quest to retrieve a treasured family heirloom, a more-than-a-century-old sofa upon which venerated rabbis once slept. But to paraphrase cyclist Lance Armstrong, it’s not about the couch.

As a girl growing up in Borough Park, Brooklyn, in the 1970s, Gluck was raised as an Orthodox Jew. Her community was an insular island of Hasidism where television and movies were forbidden and women had prescribed roles. Gluck wished only to finish high school, marry a Torah scholar and have 10 children.

That changed when she was 13 and began to question certain things about her life, such as why girls weren’t allowed to attend college. Her true liberation came with what Gluck refers to as the “miracle” of her parents’ divorce when she was in the ninth grade. She moved with her mother (who admitted to secretly taking ballroom dance lessons for years) to Manhattan, where they began a far more secular life, causing a chasm in Pearl’s relationship with her father.

A deeply devout man, he desired only to have his daughter marry and return to the community. Unwilling to fulfill that requirement, Pearl seized upon her Fulbright grant -- for a project in which she would collect oral histories from Yiddish speakers in Hungary -- as an opportunity to repair the relationship with her father. She would bring back the aforementioned divan as a symbol of her deference to his values and the family’s history.

Bringing a couch home is not as easy as it sounds, and Gluck’s determined earnestness to reclaim it provides a shrewd ploy to divert our attention from her true goal. A warm and witty young woman with a mass of curls framing her inquisitive face, Gluck manages to both charm and provoke many of the people she meets in her pursuit.

Her devotion and heartfelt search for the past wins over the eccentric cast of characters she encounters, but her unyielding modernity -- the omnipresent video camera and her “misbehaving” hair -- ruffles some of the more Orthodox interviewees. As one rabbi tells her, “I don’t mean to offend you, but your short sleeves are upsetting us.”

Gluck cleverly places her own journey in context with a chorus of interviews featuring other young people who have also left the Orthodoxy but who to varying degrees are trying to reclaim their Jewish heritage. These insightful commentaries, by what is essentially a jury of Gluck’s peers, underline the difficulty of reconciling contemporary life with the often rigid, traditional values of the past.

A Hungarian rabbi best characterizes the inherent conflicts between the old and the new. “In today’s world, everyone’s looking for their roots,” he says. “We know our roots. We don’t have to look for them.”

Gluck learns that in a culture of absolutes, it is impossible to be both inside and outside its confines. Acceptance can be found only on an individual basis, and she finally returns to the one person from whom she seeks it.

The result is a touching and humorous documentary that for all its enlightening scope, encompassing centuries of religious and cultural history and a physical voyage of thousands of miles, is ultimately a deceptively simple tale of a daughter trying to reconnect with her father across two boroughs.

*

‘Divan’

MPAA rating: Unrated

Times guidelines: Suitable for all ages

A Palinka Pictures presentation, released by Zeitgeist Films. Producer-director Pearl Gluck. Screenplay by Pearl Gluck, Susan Korda. Cinematography William Tyler Smith. Editor Zelda Greenstein. Music Frank London. In English, Hungarian and Yiddish, with English subtitles. Running time: 1 hour, 17 minutes.

Exclusively at Laemmle’s Music Hall, 9036 Wilshire Blvd., Beverly Hills, (310) 274-6869; and Laemmle’s Town Center, 17200 Ventura Blvd., Encino, (818) 981-9811.