This is yet another true, moving Holocaust story that you probably haven’t heard (though adapted from a book by Robert Marshall). It would be absurd to call the abundance of such stories a silver lining. But a tiny one might be that even as the extremeness of the Nazi movement allowed mistrust, venality, and hatred to flourish, it allowed some ordinary individuals, like Anne Frank savior Miep Gies, to achieve a measure of heroism.
The story of Leopold Socha (Robert Wieckiewicz), a petty thief, bears some parallels to that of Gies, except that Socha’s motives were, at least at the start, entirely mercenary, and the Jews he hid were people with whom he had no prior relationship and felt no particular affection. However, as the resident expert on the sewer system in Lvov, a Ukrainian city mostly populated by ethnic Poles, he and his (literal) partner in crime were in a position to help (or turn in) a small group who fled underground when the Nazis removed the city’s Jewish population. The film shows just enough Nazi brutality to set up the plot. Otherwise, it concentrates on Socha and the desperate people he and his partner agree, for a price, to assist, although none of them in particular.
This is a return to form for director Agnieszka Holland, who made the great, Holocaust-themed Europa, Europa two decades ago but most recently had made the lightweight (English-language) Copying Beethoven. (Nominated for a foreign-language-film Oscar, In Darkness lost to the brilliant A Separation.) The most noteworthy story elements, even more than the threat of discovery, are the senses of squalor and deprivation in the pipes, where the rats are so numerous that children and adults alike brush them off calmly. Additionally, the necessity of living in cramped quarters made privacy nearly impossible. (Even Leopold and his wife have sex just feet from their sleeping daughter.) Tragedy reaches underground, too, yet this desperate life was a preferable fate to that of most of the Jews in Lvov, who did not survive the war.
viewed 3/21/2012 5:30 pm at Ritz 5 and reviewed 3/21/2012
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