Ida (***1/4)

A lot of filmmakers, after making a splash with an independent or small-budget hit, will move on to blockbuster fare, but Pawel Pawlikowski has done the opposite. Best known for the English romance My Summer of Love, Pawlikowski has returned to his native Poland and made a black-and-white drama about a young woman (Agata Trzebuchowska) on the verge of taking her vows as a Catholic nun. Having grown up in the convent, she is only now being told she has a living relative, an aunt (Agata Kulesza). The aunt she never knew tells her about the parents she never knew, who were Jews who died, or were killed, during World War II.

In the course of this concisely told tale, these very different women together try to find out what happened. The contrast of personalities is about the only thing Ida has in common with My Summer of Love. Asked if she’s ever had impure thoughts, Ida says yes, but not carnal ones. Too bad, the aunt says, because it’s not much of a sacrifice if you don’t know what you’re giving up. The sheltered girl and the hard-edged, hard-drinking aunt make a sort of good-cop, bad-cop pairing, though Pawlikowski does not use this to humorous effect, as another filmmaker might have.

Instead, the style is composed and steady; the unbeautiful views of rural and small-town Poland of the 1960s create a visual impression as strong as My Summer. The ending seems possibly headed for melodrama, but Pawlikowski reins it in, concluding the story in a way that may or may not be what the viewer will want to happen, but that seemed to make sense.

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viewed 6/11/14 7:35 pm and posted 6/11/14

In Darkness (***1/4)

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.

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viewed 3/21/2012 5:30 pm at Ritz 5 and reviewed 3/21/2012

Sarah’s Key (***)

Movies that go back and forth between now and long ago tend, in my experience, to feel a little artificial. They might just as well be straight period pieces; the modern-day parts can seem like just a crap device to make the old story more obviously relevant to modern-day audiences. But see what you think of the one here, which tells a small piece of a somewhat forgotten part of the Holocaust, the French part. Kristin Scott Thomas plays an American journalist working in Paris who a) happens to have earlier written a piece on the role of collaborators rounding up Jews and is writing another one; b) learns just then that she has a family connection with the awful history. She is also just then learning she is pregnant, fifteen years after she and her husband had their only child, a daughter.

Sarah is a young girl who, in the flashback sequences, hides her little brother in a cupboard when the Jews of Paris are rounded up in July 1942. Even though I’ve seen lots of scenes like this on film, they still have a lot of power. The film then embodies two mysteries to be uncovered by the journalist. First, what happened to the boy, locked away as his family was sent first to an overcrowed arena (“like the Superdome, only a million times worse” says one character), then to more distant places that were pit stops on the way to death camps. Second, what happens to Sarah, which takes our reporter across the ocean and back. A third mystery, but less involving, involves Sarah, her husband, and the child she carries.

The connection to the present is integral to the plot and does have some cleverness, but I did find it more clever than authentic. If I hadn’t known already that the story was taken from a novel (by Tatiana de Rosnay), I think I’d have placed odds against it being a true story. There is too much melodrama, and the way it explores moral ambiguity too obvious. When, for example, Sarah’s family and the other Jews of her neighborhood are taken, a neighbor shouts “They had it coming.” Another yells in reply, “You fool! It’ll be our turn” next. The one thing it’s not is sappy. Or dull. A little more 1940s and less 2000s would have improved the balance, though.

IMDB link

viewed at Ritz 5 and reviewed 8/3/11

A Film Unfinished (***)

The rather poetic title of this documentary refers literally to a Nazi propaganda film that was shot in the Warsaw ghetto in May of 1942. The precise intent behind the filming is apparently lost to history, but clearly was propaganda. As it was, most of the residents were only a few months away from being “deported” into the Treblinka concentration camp. For 30 days, a film crew filmed the ghetto, crowded with the poor and the starving. There were, according to the film, as many as 500,000 Jews, some brought in from Germany, in a three-square-mile area, equivalent to less than 200 square feet per person. Footage of concentration camp survivors suggests that they were starved there, but clearly many of them would have already arrived that way. The Nazis filmed all of this, but also staged scenes involving the better-fed residents. Elaborate meals were served in restaurants with servers told to act cheery; performances were staged with conscripted audiences, and so on.

This is no great shakes as a documentary. There is some narration, plus extensive voiceovers that come from diaries of residents, or from the transcript of testimony by one of the filmmakers. Movingly, survivors of the ghetto, now in their late 70s or older, are shown watching the footage. This explains much of what we see, but doesn’t put it in a larger context. We are also told that the footage has been used in earlier documentaries about the Holocaust, but no examples are shown. Instead, the documentary draws its power simply from the force of the images themselves—corpses on streets, stick-thin bodies, piles of filth, etc. These may not quite match the horror of the concentration camps, but they are a less-familiar and equally potent reminder of how systematic was the brutality of the Nazis.

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viewed at Ritz Bourse [Landmark theaters screening] and reviewed 10/6/10

Toyland (**3/4) [2009 Oscar-nominated shorts program]

A mother’s protective lie to explain the neighbors’ disappearance has the boy dreaming of running away to “Toyland.” It’s Nazi Germany, and the neighbors are Jewish. The poignant twist ending (a kind of variation on The Boy in the Striped Pajamas) would have more impact if it didn’t depend on a mass of improbabilities, beginning with the idea that a couple getting taken away to a concentration camp might let the neighbor kid come with, or that he might get on the crammed train.

IMDB link

viewed at Ritz Bourse and reviewed 2/11/09

The Boy in the Striped Pajamas (***1/4)

A child’s-eye view of the Holocaust?

IMDB link

viewed 11/5/08 (screening at Ritz Bourse)

The Counterfeiters (***1/2)

I hadn’t seen this when I made my Oscar predictions, but correctly picked it for foreign-language film by observing the “Holocaust rule”—i.e., the Holocaust-themed movie always wins. Still, upon seeing it, it’s not a bad choice. It’s a much less sweeping story than Schindler’s List or The Pianist, and less horrific, simply because the main character, Salomon Sorowitsch, managed to avoid the magnitude of suffering of other Jews. In all tales of great evil, it’s easy to forget that both the heroic and the unsavory are victims. Sorowitsch was exactly what the Nazis accused him of being, a master forger, but it was their need for his skills that kept him fed. He is well aware that his ability to reproduce the British pound will help fund Hitler’s war effort, but is in no mood to sacrifice himself by trying to sabotage the effort. His nemesis, a communist, is more idealistic, but the decisions they make as individuals may also determine the fate of the men they work with.

IMDB link

viewed 3/21/08; reviewed 3/27/08

Freedom Writers (***1/4)

? Written and directed by Richard LaGravenese (writer of The Bridges of Madison County, The Horse Whisperer, and Beloved) Freedom Writers dramatizes the story of real-life high school teacher Erin Gruwell (Hilary Swank), whose first job is at a recently integrated school in Long Beach, California, where the student body isn’t so much diverse as Balkanized into racial identity groups.

+ I’ve seen other movies like this, but they don’t always seem genuine, and this does. One thing I liked about this was that you get a sense of the new teacher feeling her way in the job. She’s not an ex-marine like Michelle Pfeiffer in Dangerous Minds, instantly in command. Even after she earns the respect of the students she seems a little nerdy when she tries to be hip. She gets by on sincerity, not attitude. In the most affecting moments, the students react to learning about the Holocaust, about which few had heard. This is another great role for Swank. Patrick Dempsey and Scott Glenn play her husband and father, respectively. The reactions of these strong supporting characters provide dimension to the main character.

- This is the latest in a genre that goes back to The Blackboard Jungle 50 years ago and includes more recent movies like Stand and Deliver and, most obviously, Dangerous Minds. Even movies like the dance-oriented Take the Lead incorporate the same formula of having a deeply caring, creative teacher inculcating middle-class values in a bunch of kids who seem like thugs to everyone else. There’s always a pigheaded person of authority who gets in the way and insists the kids are incorrigible. So does this movie tweak that formula? Not a lot. The reactionary authority figure is ably played by Imelda Staunton, but, true-to-life or not, she’s a cliché. Even though the movie is based largely on the writings of the students, the teacher is far and away the most significant character. The movie is largely from her view, the one with which most of the audience is likely to identify. The most developed of the student characters is a girl named Eva who’s been asked to lie in court about having seen another Mexican American commit a shooting, but you figure out quickly where that story’s going. To be fair, people go to see movies like this because teachers like Erin Gruwell seem like rarities as against many thousands of at-risk students who won’t be able to rely on getting teachers willing to chuck their social lives to show them another way.

= ***1/4 This movie has nothing new to say, but it says it well and will probably be a tearjerker for some of the audience and essentially a feel-good movie for most of it. The question it begs is, if teachers like this are so rare that they make movies about them, what hope is there for all the other kids growing up in violence-ridden neighborhoods?

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Everything Is Illuminated (**3/4)

Everything Is Illuminated, from the novel by Jonathan Safran Foer, represents the writing and directing debut of the actor Liev Schreiber. Retaining chapter headings from the book and adding picture-postcard cinematography, it’s a movie for literary types. Elijah Wood stars as a Jewish character, also named Jonathan Foer, who heads to the Ukraine to find a woman who helped his grandfather escape the Nazis. Ukrainian-born musician Eugene Hutz plays his tour guide. As with the novel, Schreiber uses Wood’s intentionally stiff character to set off the gregarious Ukrainian, and absurdist humor to underscore pathos. There were parts that I (and the audience) laughed at, such as the guide’s incredulity at Foer’s vegetarianism. On the other hand, much feels affected. The script partly carries over the book’s device of having the Ukrainian base his English on a careless reading of a thesaurus. (Or perhaps a careful one; he precisely chooses an amiss synonym.) I found it silly rather than funny that he repeatedly refers to his grandfather’s dog as a “seeing-eye bitch.” The grandfather insists that he’s blind but agrees to serve as driver. It’s just a metaphorical blindness. Foer (the character) memorializes his life in small plastic bags (instead of a camera, I guess). Despite all this, I enjoyed the strange journey through the Ukrainian countryside (actually Prague and environs) and the emotional payoff that does eventually result.

IMDB link

reviewed 10/3/05