Thursday, January 28, 2016

Brooklyn

In Brooklyn a timid Irish girl blossoms into an Irish American woman. 
Yet it’s titled after the destination not the heroine. That points to a direct connection between this very Irish film and an essential principle of Jewish theology: Lech le-cha’. The phrase comes from Genesis, where Jehovah commands Abraham to depart his native land for an indeterminate destiny elsewhere. It is an exhortation to leave.
The common reading is: The Lord loves becoming. That is, our destiny is not to rest where we are but to move on. 
Heroine Eilis (Saorirse Ronan) leaves her mother, sister Rose and village community for the challenges, dangers and ultimately, self-realization of 1950s Brooklyn (2015 Montreal). So the film’s title emphasizes her destiny, not her initial self. 
The film begins and ends with Eilis leaving. In the first scene she leaves her home for the 7 o’clock Sunday Mass her stern employer expects her staff to attend. That is leaving as routine, going somewhere but always to the same place at the same time. That is movement as rut. There is no growth there, no risk. 
At the end she has left her solitary mother, a well-off suitor and her old world to return to America and the gentlemanly Italian plumber she has secretly married. Eilis may have been tempted to stay. But her malevolent old employer Mrs Kelly reminded her of the meanness of a self-absorbed life, our need to open out, to move on and to grow. In a phrase, Lech le-cha’
      One essential tension here is between solitude and community. Ellis’s mother survives her husband’s and daughter Rose’s deaths, now her last daughter’s departure, to find herself finally alone. In her abject solitude she can’t bear to give Eilis a second goodbye. 
Rose’s early death saved her from wasting her life on her mother’s care, as Mrs Kelly warned Eilis, to burden her with guilt. Later, with no clear motive other than to assert her empty power, Mrs Kelly shows she knows of Eilis’s marriage. 
The women form another community. Mrs Keough’s Brooklyn boarding house for Irish girls is a community far warmer and livelier than the home Eilis left. In their alliterative names and authority Mrs Keough and Mrs Kelly embody antithetical spirits of discipline and authority. Mrs Keough and the girls help and advise each other. On her first journey Eilis is bolstered by a cabin-mate’s advice, which she then passes on to another neophyte on her voyage back.
The Brooklyn priest is a model of Christian brotherhood and paternal care, as he registers and pays for Eilis’s evening course in bookkeeping.  When he invites her to help serve the parish’s Christmas dinner to the unemployed Irish men he brings her out of her self-consciousness into a new confidence and spirit. This event is the turning point in her adjustment to America. 
Even her romance is another departure. At the Irish parish dance she meets the Italian who likes Irish girls, i.e., who himself feels the spirit of moving out, Lech le-cha’. He has outgrown his kid brother’s flat statement that the family dislikes the Irish, “It’s a well-known fact.” Ellis’s best girlfriend back home didn’t feel that ambition to grow, so despite her spirit and beauty she’s happy to settle with one of the local rugby boys, despite the embarrassment of oily air and conformist blazer. Or blazing conformity. 
The Eilis who radiates on her return to Ireland is a far cry from the pallid, green mouse who moved away. She’s brighter than ever when her husband spots her on the street, having returned unannounced.
     The shared Jewish-Irish theme is after all not surprising. Abraham is an avatar of the immigrant experience, which is central to both the Irish and the Jewish in America.   

Saturday, January 23, 2016

13 Hours

One doesn’t expect substance and political significance of Michael Bay but his 13 Hours delivers both in fine, loud style. 
The film details the 2012 Libyan terrorist attack upon the US embassy in Benghazi, including the death of the ambassador. The film repeats the government’s initial but discredited claim, that he died of smoke inhalation, sparing the fine man’s memory the physical abuse and indignity he reportedly suffered while alive. It also rejects the government’s claim there had been no warning of an attack on the under-protected facility.
As in the classic Western, the anti-savagery force is split between the rod-ass by-the-book West Pointer and the intuitive, self-reliant, pragmatic Maverick. Here the disaster is caused by the secret CIA administration’s refusal to deploy the nearby corps of contract soldiers on time. 
And the political significance? The film implicitly joins the current US presidential debate. Understand, Hollywood films are always reluctant to take sides on any contentious political issue. John Wayne could risk the box office damage making The Green Berets (1968) during the contentious Vietnam War. But the liberal perspective was delivered indirectly. Robert Altman expressed the Left’s opposition to an absurd, gory Asian war but set MASH  (1970) in the Korean war instead. Scriptwriter Ring Lardner Jr knew the costs of being openly political in Hollywood. He was one of the Hollywood Ten blacklisted for supposed communist leanings. Not till Coming Home, The Deer Hunter and Apocalypse Now eight years later did the Left address the Vietnam war directly. 
And so today. The Big Short, by exposing the criminal greed of the banks behind the 2008 economic collapse, with virtually no-one punished, and no systemic changes made to prevent its recurrence, has the side-effect of promoting the economic revolution promised by Bernie Sanders, in contrast to the modest billionaire Trump and big-business-supported Hilary Clinton. 
Poor Hilary can’t buy a break here. She’s not named in13 Hours but the incompetence and callousness of her government implicates her severely, especially as this fiasco happened on her watch, i.,e., is part of the experience edge she claims over Bernie. At the same time the central tension between CIA officer and contract soldier implicitly plays to the advantage of the brash Donny Trump, maverick deluxe. 

Tuesday, January 19, 2016

The Danish Girl

“Are you a reporter,” Lily’s ball beau asks, “or a poetess?” 
Einar’s paintings are reportage, the stuff of journalism—a description of the surface appearance. So are wife Gerda’s commissioned portraits. Her success as an artist comes when she goes beyond the surface and explores her husband’s hidden sexuality, when she paints him as Lily. In moving from surface to depth, from the apparent to the possible, she moves from reportage to poetry. 
Einar’s landscapes point in that direction themselves. His landscape subjects provide the opening montage and the site of the film’s ending, when his widow and old friend Hans visit the sites he had painted. One of Einar’s recurring images is a line of thin trees standing frail atop their partial reflection in the water. In the first series a wide-reaching skeleton of a tree is completely duplicated by the water below. Those trees are an emblem of the transgender hero, with a firm material image above and a shimmering weaker one below, the male persona with a female nature submerged. Whatever Einar wears — whether in clothes or in genitalia — he dreams Lily’s dreams.       
Gerda has been subconsciously aware of her husband’s feminine nature. When she first kissed him “It was like kissing myself.” She catches his femininity when she dresses him in women’s costume and when she draws him asleep. Even as she loses her husband she supports his movement toward realizing his true gender. As he says, “I love you, because you are the only person who made sense of me. And made me, possible.” 
His old friend Hans is similarly accepting of Einar/Lily’s duality: “I've only liked a handful of people in my life, and you've been two of them.” Though as a child Hans may have been attracted to Einar — “Einar just looked so pretty and... I had to kiss him! So, yes, I kissed Einar.” — his nature proved heterosexual, as wee see in his embrace of Gerda, though he never married. The film delicately presents the gender fluidity our society has come quickly to accept.
     That is proved by the easy success Tom Hooper’s poetic melodrama has enjoyed. We’re ready to identify with and to sympathize with transgendered characters, as we have so quickly come to accept same-sex marriages. Perhaps we’re ready to embrace an actual transgendered person instead of one safely played by a good actor. We’ve had some transgendered performers on the TV shows Transparency and Orange is the New Black,  but this film settles on a safer, more sanitized presentation. The opportunity for a harder view, a more challenging realism, is ultimately allowed to drift away —like the gossamer scarf Einar gave Gerda back.  

Thursday, January 14, 2016

The Revenant

Like the classic Western, The Revenant examines the thin line between savagery and civilization, as played out in the white man’s ambivalent conquest of the native American. The central clash is between two white survivors, Hugh Glass and John Fitzgerald. 
Both men have their proteges, son Hawk and cadet Bridger respectively. Hawk soars but Bridger follows the wrong orders, imperilling his life and soul. 
Glass bridges both cultures, having lived among the Pawnee, learned their language and values, having lost a Pawnee wife and now caring for and avenging the death of his son Hawk. 
Glass lives with the spirit of his slaughtered wife and in the last shot appears to rejoin her in the spirit world. Indeed the title may connote dreamer and avenger but it literally means a returning spirit. As he says before his last mission, “I ain't afraid to die anymore. I'd done it already.” Hawk says to the moribund Glass, then Glass says to dead Hawk what he said to his dead wife: “I’m right here. You hear me?” The spirits are there to address. This rebuts Fitzgerald’s last remark: “You came all this way just for your revenge, huh? Did you enjoy it, Glass?... 'Cause there ain't nothin' gon' bring your boy back.”
Fitzgerald survived a scalping. When he meets his ultimate end it’s not directly at Glass’s hand but by nature. The Pawnee consign him to the rushing river. 
Fitzgerald is reduced to the material. He’s greedy, murderous, dishonourable in every way. He has no moral sense. In his theology God is a squirrel you can shoot and eat. 
For Glass and the natives nature is a far larger spirit than an edible squirrel. That’s the point of the powerful images of the landscape, Kananaskis (aka the suburbs of Calgary). God is in the land, either as a harsh test or as an enabling spirit. When Glass pulls himself out of the gutted horse he overnighted inside, he pats a respectful salute before moving on. 
The central metaphor is what Glass learned from his wife: “As long as you can still grab a breath, you fight. You breathe. Keep breathing. When there is a storm. And you stand in front of a tree. If you look at its branches, you swear it will fall. But if you watch the trunk, you will see its stability.“ Time and again Glass saves himself or is saved by deploying the twigs and trunks around him. When he rides off a cliff a tall tree breaks his fall. In contrast, the French hang his Pawnee friend from a tree, a summary if not an emblem of European civilization. The Pawnee serve the nature the ostensibly “civilized” exploit.
Both the white and the native sides are mixed. Civilization is undercut by the army’s savagery when it eliminates Glass’s adopted tribe. As Glass warns his son, “They don't hear your voice! They just see the color of your face. You understand? “ Even the counselled silence won’t save Hawk. Glass as rumoured did kill an officer: “I just killed a man who was trying to kill my son.”
Captain Andrew Henry is a man of honour and integrity, proved by his confrontation of Fitzgerald. But his company shows a moral blind spot when its workers end up owing the company for their expenses on a thwarted hunt for pelts. In the absence of tribal loyalty and values, the company has to pay its men to do anything. 
There is also savagery among the natives, as the Sioux try to wipe out the Pawnee. But the one native’s pursuit of his daughter, abducted and raped by the French, and the succour Glass gets from another isolated Pawnee put them on the honourable side.
     As usual this historic drama is about the time it is made as well as the time in which it is set. Star DiCaprio makes its pertinence clear when he speaks out against the threat of the oil sands and pipelines to the natural preserve and our continuing neglect of native rights. 

Wednesday, January 13, 2016

The Hateful Eight

This horse operatic Grand Guignol (aka splatter movie) opens on a snow-covered agonized wooden Christ and closes on Roy Orbison’s antiwar dirge, “There Won’t be Many Coming Home.”  That frame suits a story of damned souls in a nation still at war. 
In between, not only does everyone get killed but there’s a flashback where even more get killed. Quentin Tarantino’s eighth film plays at being hateful but it’s epic, bloody, dramatic, with a sense off fun and a reverence for pulp cinema. It’s about hate.
Specifically it’s about the racial divide still going strong long after the end of the Civil War. As peace-making Mowbray remarks: “Gentlemen, I know Americans aren't apt to let a little thing like unconditional surrender get in the way of a good war….” (That could be the slogan for the next Republican convention.) 
Only one of the main characters does not refer to the Samuel Jackson character as “nigger.” Even the characters who like and admire him do. The bounty hunter says “Now, girl, don't you know darkies don't like being called niggers no more? They find it offensive.”
This period piece actually reflects upon the racism still percolating through the United States — not just “despite” having the first black president but “in response to it.” “Give us back our country,” quoth Sarah Palin, in redneck code. This film is about racism now, not just then. You hear it when people of all stripes say “I just hate Obama” as if they disputed his policies. 
“The nigger in the stable has a letter from Abraham Lincoln!?!?!” The line is repeated, incredulous. He does have a letter and it works to disarm the supposedly superior whites. As Warren says, “The only time black folks are safe, is when white folks is disarmed.” And this letter has the desired effect. It gets him on the stage. But as he admits, the black man wrote it himself. A parting reference to Mary Todd is “a nice touch,” he smiles.
     But it works, like the 20th Century civil rights movement worked to legitimize black citizenship in America. But it didn’t work completely, as our continuing slaughter of black citizens daily proves. As the new white sheriff remarks, “'Cuz when niggers are scared, that's when white folks are safe.“
The white man’s sexual fear of the negro plays in the hero’s report of the southern general’s son’s death and in the hero later having his balls shot off. Here even the heroic and successful black man is ultimately emasculated. It’s the black guy, by the way, who has the logical and deductive skills to solve the mystery. In a delightful irony, the emasculated black hero ensures that the murderess is well hung. Well, “hanged,” properly speaking, but they do say “hung.”
     The story is told in chapters, with a narrator providing a flashback, to impose a formal rhythm on the unfolding carnage. It’s a bracing reminder of America’s unfinished business. 

Sunday, January 10, 2016

11 Minutes

The film’s most blatant metaphor is the dead pixel on a computer screen. 
       The spot abounds. One security officer tries to wipe it off, thinking it’s a bird dropping. In the last image, a proliferation of thousands of screen images that turns into an abstraction as the screens multiply, the black spot persists. The painter catches it in an accidental ink stain, but the young thief recognizes it from the sky. The blot in the sky may be what the sleazy “director” points to the actress to lure her out on the balcony.
So what’s a burned pixel? It’s an imperfection, a flaw, the fly in the ointment, what stops us short of perfection. It’s the governing principle of life, which we might otherwise conceptualize as the vagaries of destiny, fate, doom, coincidence, the quirk that prevents our harmony and peace. What renders mankind vulnerable. 
In the final plethora of images thousands of lives unwind on separate screens. It’s like the security officers’ multiple outlook but multiplied. Thousands of people engaged in thousands of incidents, each with its own tensions, designs, solitudes, united only by what connections they have in time and space. Yet any one can suffer a turn that ties several together in a shared disaster. Fate is a burned out pixel. 
As Skolimowski intercuts several storylines in the same 11 minutes we have no idea how these lives will intersect, if at all. As it happens, the director flogging a fake script to seduce an actress sets the dominoes falling. Ironically, the self-styled director ends up making the film’s spectacular disaster climax. He makes a film after all, a disaster rather than porn but a movie. A jealous husband helps, but so do the two hotel security officers whose attempt to save the husband kills the wife.
There is no logic in our lives, just the interweaving of chance and mischance. Having seen the ending one craves to see the whole film afresh to look for the auguries of coincidence and doom.
In all the stories here, there is no joy. The closest we get to innocence and unalloyed pleasure is the nuns enjoying the hot dogs and the vendor’s knowledge. But even there, the vendor has a sordid past expressed by a young woman; he's a fallen academic. And nuns in habits are far from purity when they partake of a street hot dog, even apart from “the sin of gluttony.”
     Presumably the baby is born innocent but it's into a world of death (the man in the next room) and violent malevolence (the staircase obstructor). Otherwise each little drama involves sin and transgression.  
      Most of the climactic deaths are by fire and falling. That suggests the film's religious context.  The characters have tasted the forbidden fruit and are therefore sentenced to t6he human condition. This film is about postlapsarian man, born into (un-)Original Sin.  The punishment is disproportionate to the sins. C'est la vie.

Saturday, January 9, 2016

The High Sun

The High Sun is a trilogy in which the same two actors play romantic leads in separate stories a decade apart, their lives paralyzed by the Serbian-Croatian war. The structure harkens back to the magazine anthology film in early Italian neorealism.
In 1991 the girl’s brother refuses to let her marry her lover from the other side. He forcibly returns her from their planned escape to the city. When the lover gives chase he’s held at the border. In the ensuing scuffle the lover is shot dead. The girl is unconsolable, her brother shocked at the death he did not even in his rage intend. 
In 2001 the buildings are ruined from the bombings. A mother and daughter return from the city to their battered house and hire a young man to rebuild it. Again the tensions between the enemy sides persist. The social ruin outlives the physical. 
The mother and boy deliberately set that gap aside to get on with their lives. But the girl freezes him out, because his side killed her brother. She attacks her mother for accepting him. Sensing her prejudice the boy turns on the girl: “Am I to blame for his death?” Besides: her side killed his father. 
Typical of the film’s attention to telling detail, a pearl of sweat runs down the girl’s nape as she watches the boy work and is attracted. Chastened by his scolding, on his last day of the job she initiates a passionate round of sex. This commits him to her but she shuts him out: “That’s it then.” 
He’s off to a big job in the city, but in parting he causes her second thoughts when he generously gives her mother back his salary. “You’re moving here. You’ll need this.” Re-won by this generosity, the girl wistfully watches him disappear from her life. This love was a casualty of the war hatreds that live on among the ruined buildings and lives.   
Long after the war, in 2001 a young man returns from university in the city for a big summer party. As we learn, at his mother’s insistence he abandoned his pregnant Serbian girlfriend to go to school. He still resents his parents for encouraging that stance. When he visits the girl and sees her little son he regrets it even more. His former lover freezes him out altogether — an extension of the post-coital freeze in the second episode.  
The boy tries to lose himself in the booze, drug and sex orgy on the beach. A swim seems to bring him back to his senses. He leaves the girl and goes back to his former lover’s house. When she doesn’t answer his knocks he sits on the stoop and waits. She comes out, sits beside him, both mute, then arises and goes back into her house. She leaves the door open.  We don’t know if he’ll go in, but whatever happens their love is gone. The silent open door expresses resignation not their old passion, which was a fatal casualty of the prejudice and cowardice of the war. 
In all three stories the city is a distant escape, as if the war and its effects could be escaped anywhere geographic. The landscape is studded with the wounds and destruction of war. But as man and his constructions pass, the larger rhythms of life persist, especially the cycle of love and loss and the rhythms of nature. Hence the river figures in each episode, the fields, and a silent dog that is witness to all three tragedies.  

Atomic Heart

Atomic Heart flies in the face of everything we know about Iranian cinema. It’s a surrealistic version of Taxi, with two 20-something dyed-hair party girls navigating the wild night streets of Tehran in place of that film’s earnest driver. 
The girls begin as most un-Iranian heroines: self-indulgent, tipsy, indecorous, flashy, stylish, keen proponents of Western culture, as they sing “We Are the World” and cite Celine Dion. They’re brassy when they talk to their male friend and a cop. In short, they appear to be two young women exercising a power we’re astonished to see Iranian women have.
That passes. A couple of elevator scenes frame their change in attitude. In the first the redhead stops and starts the elevator doors from the outside, mischievously playing the machine. Later the elevator will run out of her control, with her friend first inside then magically transported to the high-rise’s roof where her life is endangered.   
Two things jolt the girls out of their sense of power. The first is a traffic accident. Driving the wrong way up a one-way street, they hit another car. The second is the mysterious stranger Toofan who crops up there and continues magically to till the end. 
Toofan explains the history of Western toilets and their debt to Iran and China. After this humorous scholarship toilets become a pressing need for the girls. Toofan pays the man’s car damages and disappears when the police come. 
The police are surprisingly considerate, given what we hear of Iran. They’re not alarmed by the girls’ breath tests. The one escorting them to the police station asks for some intelligent criticism of the film Argo, so he can pretend he’s seen it.  The girls properly criticize it for its inaccuracies and for its insulting over-generalized representation of Iranians. Satisfied, he lets the girls off in order to question their male friend. 
Toofan’s reappearance shifts the film to surrealism. He brings Saddam Hussein (yes, the dead one) into the car and has the girls drive him to a meeting in a limo. From then on Toofan takes control of the girls’ lives and possibly their minds. If the girls began by being cocky about their freedom and power, Toofan subdues them, bending them to his will to the point of tempting them to a suicidal plunge putatively into another dimension. Of course their destiny is resolved by a game of paper, rock, scissors. (That could be a better course to world peace than the UN.)
    To Toofan Tehran is paradise but he dresses Western cool. Without a clue about how this film would be read by its home audience, I’m wary about any interpretation. But I’d offer this: It extends its heroines an extravagant freedom in character and power but only to rein them in to serve a larger power beyond their normal ken. If the girls feel liberated from one level of control there’s always another. That makes this surreal frolic rather reactionary. The girls don't move toward freedom but from a shallow freedom to a nearly fatal brush with an unfamiliar power.

Here is Harold

So there is Ikea — proud emblem of modern, efficient Sweden. The international retailer makes comfort and classiness accessible to the budget-conscious. A little money, an Allen wrench and anyone (almost) can live in style. That is, Ikea style, which is pretty good if not especially permanent. And those meatballs. Mmmm. 
But here is Harold. Harold is a more traditional furniture dealer, who makes a sturdy, labor intensive chair and sells longer-lasting value and style. For 40 years he has been the foremost furniture dealer in his Norway community, until the Swedish behemoth moves in next door and saps his business. Harold represents the human cost when a monster company moves in. Harold is the saddening truth that lies behind the flashy success. 
The opening scene shows the huge Ikea plant being assembled in time-lapse photography, as if out of a box. Then Ikea bankrupts Harold’s business, forcing him and his wife to vacate their store and home. 
  Worse, Harold can no longer look after his disintegrating wife. When he tries to put her in a home even the accordion band fails to impress her. She drops dead, having fired a last round of obscenities at her helpers. 
Harold burns down his old building, but the sprinkler system thwarts his auto-da-fe. So he decides to kidnap the Ikea founder and owner, Ingvar Kamprad.
But as this is an Ikea project Harold’s plan has a few pieces missing. He has no plan or end-game. He doesn’t know how he’ll get to Kamprad, until the man pops up on the highway needing a lift. Harold doesn’t know what he wants out of the deal, whether money (and how much) or the validation of forcing Kamprad to record a public confession of his company’s malfeasance.
The Ikea project also inevitably has a few extra parts — the other losers Harold encounters. His own son has lost his job, marriage and a barroom scuffle. A vagrant teenage girl finds Harold stuck in his car in the snow and sort of saves his life. She helps Harold handle Kamprad, providing a trailer refuge and saving both men from drowning in the ice.  Harold helps her deal with her slatternly mother who sleeps around trying to recover her glory as NW Sweden twirling titlist. Harold finds himself centring a circle of lost souls, people with dashed hopes, financial, emotional and career constraints — in fact, the sad human underbelly of the Ikea success. 
      For his part Kamprad sails through his ordeal unperturbed, friendly to his captors, helpful with his advice, warning them off pitfalls, ever ready to brag about an old money-saving idea or to come up with a new. Once set free, he hides in Harold’s trunk. Returned to Ikea he invites him up for a drink. Like Ikea, this Kamprad is a breed apart, sailing through life with confidence and brass, impervious to the damage he transcends. Kamprad goes back to his empire and Harold to his -- his broken son.
     But it's in a new spirit. Fishing alone on the ice -- and futilely -- he gives a huge laugh at the absurdity of life and the impossibility of being self-sufficient. He draws back from despair and now moves on to give his son the help he once focused on his wife. Kamprad has his store but Harold still has family.

Friday, January 8, 2016

A Grain of Truth

In A Grain of Truth Borys Lankosz uses the conventions of the film noir to anatomize the current resurgence of antisemitism in Europe, in particular the legend that Jews use Christian blood, especially children’s, to make matzoh. 
Detective Teo is the classic noir loner, a disenchanted man, divorced, cut off from his daughter, sent down from Warsaw to solve a murder in the provinces. He’s so insensitive to the climate that he innocently refers to the sidelocks of the possible killer, immediately triggering the appreciation of the quietly antisemitic citizens. His detachment drives off his local girlfriend. 
The film smacks of the Noir shadows and the underground but also deploys the fantastical imagery of classical antisemitism. The title footage of surreal bloodletting, supported by the antisemitic old religious paintings, a Jewish caricature puppet and an apparent Orthodox phantom segues into the realism of the murder case. 
The actual killer turns out to be Teo’s first suspect. But the killer’s careful use of Jewish slaughtering techniques and instruments throws the prosecutor off track. He leaves his sense of a crime of passion for the apparent crime of bile. The killer mobilizes antisemitic legend and history to scapegoat the Jewish investigator, who seems out to avenge the loss of his family to the local Nazis. 
Teo gets his second thought when he remembers the the rabble-rouser who claimed there is always a grain of truth to legends like the Jewish blood libel. Teo remembers that there is no grain of truth to that, so he rethinks the case. He remembers that it was he who — upon only a brief meeting — identified the dead woman’s husband as the second corpse and he remembers the missing hobo. 
  The deep tunnel setting, with its hellish hounds and explosion, is an image of the West’s subconscious, in which the old hatred of the Jews roils again — without a grain of truth. The bloody painting in the church is covered by a portrait of the Pope — not eradicated. 
Lankosz’s point is that antisemitism is not just an evil falsehood in itself, but an instrument to commit further evil. The killer commits his three murders because he knows he can have them blamed on a Jew. While Poland has a long history of antisemitism, the film applies more widely, as antisemitism is resurging throughout Europe and even on North American campuses. The big lie has taken new root and thrives. 

Thursday, January 7, 2016

My Mother

In My Mother director Nanni Moretti examines three generations of women as they attempt to find their identities and make their lives. 
The title emphasizes the grandmother, as her heart weakens and she loses hold on her mind and body. Her teaching Latin stressed the discipline of structure — in a sentence, hence in life — but she also knew when to cut loose and dance with her students. One remembers that she taught them life as well as Latin. In another Latin lesson, she urges a nuanced sensitivity to verbs. Nouns are easy enough, the given, but what counts is what we do, the verbs, the actions that we choose to define us and our lives. 
Her granddaughter is a teenager just adopting the Latin discipline. She is already negotiating her relationships with her divorced parents. When she gets her scooter she learns that riding it requires care but also a loosening up and a leaning in. It’s an emblem of the balance she needs to move along in life — as granny balanced discipline with dance. For want of that discipline, the girl’s school term was ruined by a heartbreaking love. 
The central character is the girl’s mother, Margherita, a film director trying to make a labour drama while dealing with her mother’s decay and death. An ex-lover actor says that she’s too insensitive to others and too willful to get along. 
Her problem lies in the instruction she gives her actors: “Play the actor as well as the role.” The actors don’t understand that and she admits she doesn’t either. A director normally asks a director for total immersion in the character. But in her life Margherita lives detached from others. That’s why her two relationships ended, why she didn’t know about her daughter’s heartbreak, why she only now learns what values and esteem her mother commanded.  
In contrast to these three strong women are two weak men. John Turturro plays the comic butt, an American actor whose ego dwarfs his abilities and record. As he struggles with the language and the lines he’s a caricature of playing the actor instead of the role. 
Director Moratti himself plays Margherita’s brother, embodying the ineffectuality usually ascribed to the women in a male-cantered drama. The devoted son takes a leave of absence from his job, then quits it altogether, despite being warned how hard it will be for a man his age to find another. Driven to fulfil the noun, devoted son, he withdraws from the constructive and responsible verbs  or actions, leaving himself helpless.
     The last word of the film is Margherita’s memory of her mother saying “Tomorrow,” when asked what she’s thinking. Her daughter and granddaughter have learned from her how to face the future. Her son backed away.

Eye in the Sky

Gavin Hood’s Eye in the Sky pulls a breathtaking entertainment out of an intellectually rigorous debate on the ethics of remote war-making.  
An opening title quotes Aeschylus: “Truth is the first casualty of war.” Even in this lettering, the “truth” fades away.
As the various American, British and African principles debate the chance to kill three most-wanted Islamic terrorists and prevent two suicide bombers, the dialogue demonstrates increasingly thin shavings off the truth. Colonel Powell (Helen Mirren) is the prime practitioner as she strives to persuade the political, legal and military consultants to fire the missile, despite its threat to a nine-year-old Nairobi girl who pauses her hula hooping to sell her mother’s bread. That is: she’s really cute.
The girl has to be cute, plucky, endearing, and — to boot — harassed by an Islamic fanatic, to fully flesh out the value of the “innocent” threatened in collateral damage. A statistic is one thing, but fleshing out such an appealing “innocent” really focuses the debate. 
And a brilliant, circumspect debate this film provides. How much “collateral damage” can we allow when there’s a chance to snuff major terrorist operatives, especially when it would prevent two suicide bombings? What latitude is allowed the military, especially as conditions change from the original mission’s approval? What legal issues arise and what clout is allowed them? How pertinent should political considerations be?
      And that great god, public relations? Hence the "idealist" who would rather blame the terrorists for 80 lost innocent lives than have America blamed for one. This character deserves the closing slam: "Never tell a soldier he doesn't know the human cost of war."
When American and British citizens are targeted, of course, the dilemmas compound, even if they are converts to terrorism. International sensitivities abound when American soldiers join a British operation to kill three nationalities of terrorism — in a friendly country.
This film has the virtue of giving each side in the debate a full, respectful airing. It’s not an easy matter. The situations are too complex for simple positions and confidence. But if we don’t acknowledge the legal and moral shadings then we’re akin to the terrorists.
Our initial takeaway from the plot is confidence in the technological power at the West’s disposal, with its spy and firing drones and its incredible communication systems — till a battery dies. 
But the additional point is that which separates us from the radicals. For all our technology we are also ruled by — if not afflicted with — moral and ethical responsibilities. That’s what puts us at a disadvantage when we face unscrupulous radicals. We are ruled by principles, where they can do what they can.
     Our moral restraints may balance out our technological advantages — but they are precisely what justifies our fight against the lawless. If we are no more moral than they, what right have we to fight them? The eye in the sky is not just the drone but our conscience -- and sense of judgment from above. That could even range beyond the Prime Minister.
     To the film’s credit, we don’t get the sentimental happy ending we’re hoping for. We can't just wish away the suffering and loss of the innocent. The little girl’s death leaves us properly unsettled by the power of modern technology and the moral ambiguity that surrounds its use. Especially when we succeed. 

Wednesday, January 6, 2016

Rams

The rams of the title are not just the sheep but the two brothers. They are stubborn, headstrong, dumb, and like the sheep afflicted with scrapies insane.
Gummi was always the good brother, solid, dependable. Kiddi was the delinquent, irresponsible and wild. So their father left the family sheep farm to Gummi. Of course that only made Kiddi more of a wastrel, wild and drunk. Their dying mother made Gummi promise he would always let Kiddi farm there two. The old bachelors live in neighboring farmhouses, communicating only through messages relayed by a sheepdog. Twice we see Gummi reluctantly forced to save Kiddi from freezing to death.
When Kiddi’s flock is found to have scrapies all the flocks have to be eliminated to prevent its spread. Financial compensation is provided, along with government assistance in the killing and cleansing. But that doesn’t make up for the community’s loss of their sheep, their warmth and companionship, through the lonely freeze.
Ever anti-social, Kiddi refuses to comply but is arrested and his flock destroyed. Gummi pretends to comply, but against regulations kills the sheep himself. He feels too much love for his sheep, one ram in particular, so he stashes the ram and several ewes in his basement. Though Gummi is the more virtuous, secreting possibly afflicted sheep in his basement is a criminally antisocial indulgence. 
When Kiddi learns Gummi’s secret the brothers begin to reconnect. When the sheep are discovered Kiddi helps Gummi first hide them, then drive them off into the mountains. Gummi’s new delinquency brings the brothers together.
     The film closes on Gummi naked in Kiddi’s embrace as they struggle to stay warm in a cave Kiddi has carved for them under the storming snow. This time Kiddi saves Gummi. “It will be alright, Gummi,” Kiddi assures him, but there is no sign of life in him. Do both survive? Does just one? No matter — the brothers have bridged their decades-old schism and are together in the snow in a womb-like warmth.

Sunset Song

Terence Davies’ new film treads familiar grounds despite his shift to the early 1900s Highlands. A violent father is brutally insensitive to his oldest son and daughter — and to his wife, who kills herself and her infant twins when she finds he has impregnated her again. 
The son weds and disappears to Argentina but we follow the daughter, Chris, as she takes over the farm and matures into motherhood and womanhood. 
The mother’s most poignant speech teaches Chris that women are helpless before men. By men the mother has in mind brutes like her husband, not gentle idealists like her oldest son. And like Ewan, the farm boy neighbour Chris weds and loves. 
The film’s leisurely 135 minutes observes the passing of the days and seasons and vicissitudes of life working up to a crucial revelation at the end. Now a father, Ewan is pressured to enlist in the First World War. He comes down the stairs and announces he’s off to Aberdeen the way her brother did when he broke away from home. But Ewan was reluctant to leave his wife and bairn.
We don’t see Ewan’s battleground experiences but we see how they’ve changed him when he storms home for a short leave. Coarse, violent, angry, insulting — he has turned into an irreligious version of her happily departed father. Unlike her mother, though, Chris won’t be cowed. The morning after he’s raped her she holds him off with a knife: “I’m not afraid of you.” He returns coldly to his unit.
Chris continues to run the farm without him. She refuses to believe the government letter reporting he died in battle in France. Then his old comrade tells her she should know the truth: Ewan was shot as a coward and deserter. He’s telling her because he wants her to get on with her young life. 
Then we get the film’s only flashback. That friend is preparing Ewan to face the firing squad. The Ewan we see is the old Ewan, not the brutalized soldier who was so repulsive on his visit home. Finally believing he’s dead, Chris realizes that “He did it for me.” 
That line — and the intrusive flashback — takes some unpacking. Ewan couldn’t stay out of the war for her, however he tried, as he was openly charged with cowardice. Nor could he prevent the war’s brutalizing effect on him. So to save her from having to live with the brute he has become he has himself killed. As we view the firing squad from his perspective Davies implicates the citizenry in the savagery that launches and embraces warfare. 

Not sharing her mother’s cynical experience of men, Chris remembers the Ewan she loved, the gentle, considerate man. So she infers that he had himself killed rather then impose on her what the war had made him. That’s the song she sings to his sunset.  

Tuesday, January 5, 2016

3,000 Nights

Mai Masri’s 3000 Nights is an expertly made propaganda film. It’s better as a model for how to make one than as history. 
As in any “story,” the particular stands for the general. What may be a freakish occurrence in real life becomes — once turned into a story, film, play, whatever — representative of a common phenomenon. As Aristotle put it, “history” happens just once, “fiction” what happens always and everywhere. 
In this case, the story of one mother’s devotion to her son and to preserving his life despite her imprisonment is intended to speak to the values of her culture. In the case of Palestinians, however, this is a misrepresentation of their cultural values. Palestinian mothers openly extol their sons’ martyrdom. As we see on Palestinian TV and banners, their children are trained to become soldiers and martyrs from a disturbingly early age. Children are being trained to kill Jews.
As in any “story,” too, the meaning inheres in (i) what details are included within the “frame” and (ii) what details are framed out. Here, for example, an end title reveals that 700,000 Palestinians have been imprisoned in Israeli jails since 1948. What is discreetly omitted is why: Since 1948 the Palestinians have refused any offer of statehood that required them to abandon their plan to replace Israel, i.e., that would have required their peaceful coexistence. The current "intifada" is emblematic of their 70-odd years of relentless attacks upon Jewish citizens. 
There are other examples of “rigging” the story to suit the purpose, which in this case is to valorize the Palestinian and to demonize the Israeli. One clue is casting. The Jewish inmates are ugly, the Palestinians pretty. One Jewish warden is a vicious woman who speaks through clenched teeth. To appear even-handed there is a token liberal Jew, the lawyer who represents our heroine, a Jewish junkie whom she saves and is rewarded in return, and the doctor. 
Centering the story upon women emphasizes the drama of innocents victimized. Our heroine is abandoned by her husband, who flees to Canada and only returns to try to steal her son. But the prisoner who helps her and gives her son a carved bird promises a genuine fidelity. Guess you can’t trust the diaspora. 
For all we know, only one of the Palestinian woman prisoners is a terrorist, plus the older woman’s two “freedom fighter”  grandsons. The woman has been jailed for 15 years, has lost an arm, instigates the riot, and lies in the gas at the end, subdued but not conquered, banging her tin cup to restart the resistance. 
The film explicitly promotes the idea of kidnapping Jews to swap for prisoners. In the riot the prisoners capture six Israeli guards and negotiate the freeing of the same number of inmates. Our heroine stays in jail, to stoke our sense of injustice. 
The equal exchange is another misrepresentation. More typically, one or a few Israeli prisoners are exchanged for hundreds or even thousands of Palestinian prisoners. This is the Palestinian, not the Israeli, appraisal of the relative value of a Palestinian life. An end title reports an exchange of 6 Israeli guards for over 5,000 Palestinian prisoners. That promotes this criminal strategy.
By the way, for an alternative view of how Israeli and Palestinian prisons treat their respective charges, check the newsreel footage of the 2011 exchange of the one Israeli Galid Shalit for 1,027 Arab prisoners, of which 280 were serving life sentences for fatal terrorism. Shalit was haggard and under-nourished, the Arabs quite healthy. Of course, the Palestinian prisoners in this film are nowhere near that guilty.  
Some touches are subtle. References to Allah are translated to God in the subtitles, bridging the gap between Arab and non-Arab audiences.They become us. The Palestinians here are completely secular: not a hijab, no prayer, no religious barriers to inhibit our identification with them and our support. 
When the heroine is first taken prisoner she’s hung by the arms in a thin white slip, as if she were at sexual risk. Sex is excluded from the cells here, though a butch Israeli prisoner threatens her.
A couple of touches play on the unconscionable myth that Israel is the new Nazi. In an early scene Israeli guards have vicious German (i.e., Nazi) shepherd dogs. Later the JDF quells the prison riot with — what else? — canisters of gas, killing at least one young girl. 
Less subtle touches challenge credibility, like the Israeli doctor keeping the woman shackled on each hand and leg while delivering her baby. Fun fact: Israeli hospitals treated 180,000 Palestinians in 2015. Number of Israelis Palestinian hospitals treated: 0. Just the facts, ma'am. 
Even the time is carefully selected. The 1982 setting enables the TV news to report the infamous Sabra and Shattila massacres, where Israeli forces stood by as their Christian allies slaughtered Lebanese. 
The heroine’s trial is cut to a single question. When she denies having been threatened by the young terrorist she gave a ride to, she’s convicted and sentenced to eight years in jail. In fact, the Israeli justice system is independent of the government and famous for more circumspect conduct. It taxes credibility to suggest that a Palestinian schoolteacher just married would be convicted without any further questioning or evidence.
Propaganda also ignores alternative possibilities. After an Israeli soldier is killed, a wounded young terrorist is caught near the crime scene, being driven away by a Palestinian woman. Wouldn’t she be a logical suspect? We “know” she’s innocent because she’s played by a beautiful, sensitive actress, but terrorism is rife with innocent looking perpetrators and abettors. In a propaganda film, a plausible trial is sacrificed for the villainy of a brisk unfair one, however implausible.
     And it works. At the Palm Springs Festival screening, the gasps and moans of indignation and shock suggested a palpable swelling of rage against Israel. No matter it was based on lies and distortions. 
The heroine is pure virtue. She is too noble to claim the wounded boy threatened her, coercing her cooperation. Later she’s too noble to abort her child, even after her husband supports the warden’s insistence. She quits the Arab prisoners’ strike to feed and to keep her son, but rejoins it when he’s removed.
     With such a virtuous heroine — and such a stacked deck — it’s hard to watch this film and not be swept along. Propaganda aims to do an end run around your logic and the facts for a direct hit on the emotions. Abandon intelligence and responsibility ye who enter here. 

The Girl King

Mika Kaurismaki’s Queen Christina of Sweden (Malin Buska) is tall, beautiful, and without a hump on one shoulder, but otherwise she’s a fair representation of the historic figure. In her restless spirit, intellectual appetite, impatience with the patriarchy and her lesbianism she’s a much more accurate representation than Rouben Mamoulian’s  (Garbo in Queen Christina, 1933). 
Of course Kaurismaki opts to revive the 17th Century Christina story now because it’s a sharp reflection of our times. I don’t know how Swedes or Finns will see their lives in this film, but much of it rings clear for North America and Europe today. The film bristles with pertinence, like the male advisor’s “Peace doesn’t fill our coffers” and her “Austerity is sadistic.”
Christina’s advocacy of peace, culture, the arts, make her a model for modern leadership. In her refusal to accept male authority, especially not to allow any man to claim her as a field he can plow for his pleasure, she is the prototypal feminist. Sadly, the contemporary also limns through her ultimate defeat by the male authority and their rejection of her same-sex passion as “deviance.” Her male counsellors conspire against her, drive off her beloved, and drive Christina into madness, until she escapes. 
We’re still hung up on the questions she poses to Descartes: what is love, how do we deal with it, how can we free ourselves from it. We still crave the freedom to define our own destiny and escape our inherited structures and strictures. If we’ve moved beyond Descartes’ assumption that our emotions have a physical source, we continue to build upon his confidence in empirical evidence and in the essential use of reason. 
But another Cartesian statement propels the film: To find the truth we must abandon everything we have learned or assumed and establish a new understanding of our world. This is the triumph of discovery over habit, reason over delusion, freedom over “destiny.” This is how this Christina constantly flies in the face of what she has been taught and what is expected of her. 
Her escape is ironic. Her advisors having long insisted she marry to produce a clear heir to the throne, she now proclaims one suitor her son and bestows upon him her royal authority. With a quarter of the treasury she departs to Rome, where she converts to Catholicism and enjoys the life of secular culture and stimulation she has craved. As one counsellor bitterly observes, having rejected all her male suitors she settles into life under the authority of the Pope. The last shots, however, play her as exulting in openness, freedom and the light the Swedish court and “thinkers” denied her. She abandons her throne and power to recreate herself in Rome.
     Now, here’s the crowning irony. Mika and younger brother Aki Kaurismaki are famous for acerbic contemporary stories about inarticulate, hard drinking, ugly and lugubrious losers, steeped in 1950s rock and roll. Nobody in a blind test would guess the sumptuous period drama  The Girl King is a Kaurismaki film. But here the director does what his heroine does and what her healthiest mentor, Descartes, prescribed.  To find the truth, to see how Queen Christina reflects upon our current reality, Kaurismaki discarded his customary period, his familiar genres and his signature style, tone and bathos — to make something completely new. And true to our day as it is to his subject’s.

Monday, January 4, 2016

Mountain

In Yaelle Kayam’s first shot an orthodox Jewish woman Zvia wends up through the flat tombstones of the Jewish cemetery on Jerusalem’s Mount of Olives. In her last the woman walks down towards her house, on the edge of the cemetery, but disappears among the stones. 
We’ve seen her prepare two pots of stew. One she laced with rat poison, the other not. 
Which did she kill, her family or the prostitutes, pimps and druggies she has furtively watched, then started to feed? The holiest having failed her, she turns to the most secular. We are not told which. That means we’re not supposed to know. Which she killed is irrelevant. We see that she has been pushed to the point where she felt she had no other option but to make a dramatic action. The point is not whom she killed but that she had been driven to kill. That is the cost of an inhumane piety. 
A case could be made either way. She could have killed her family because of her frustration at her unloving and insensitive husband’s neglect and the burden he imposed on her, to raise their four children with him more a hindrance than a help. She could have killed the outsiders to rid herself of their fascination and to protect herself from the one who followed her home. When the sacred is so oppressive the profane has its allure. Either way, she has been pushed to desperation. 
Her meeting with a happy orthodox mother suggests Zvia’s religion is not the problem. The problem is Reuven’s rejection. He ignores her request he return the jam because it’s fattening. He supports the older daughter’s rebellion against her. He stays away late without warning. He assumes extra duties to stay away more. He rejects her affection and overtures.
     But an arranged marriage doesn’t have to be loveless, she knows, so she lies and tells Reuven that the Arab gravedigger told her he has a happy loving marriage with seven children.   
Zvia makes small rebellions. She smokes. She has short friendly chats with the Arab gravedigger. With her back to us she eats, furtively. With no clear motive in mind she spies on the cemetery intruders, then talks to a prostitute, then brings them meals and stays to watch them eat and have sex. Her final rebellion is the mortal one, a more dramatic action than those small ones. She acts in despair.
The setting is crucial. The Mount of Olives is where the Messiah will rise and raise the dead. Here instead of resurrection and a saviour we get the hopeless woman and her group murder. In the distance we can see the holiest mountain of the two faiths, the Jews’ Temple Mount and the Arabs’ Al Aqsa. One mountain, two natures and value systems and histories. But the title’s meaning is a third mountain still: the marital relationship that a couple must climb together for the marriage and family to survive. 
Instead the cemetery movement is usually horizontal here. As the first irritated couple finds, the cemetery is like a maze in which a mouse can get lost and fall prey. Zvia can navigate the cemetery maze and advise others, but in her flat, obscure marriage she finds no other way out but this violent one.
Reuven is completely immersed in his religion, his work at the yeshiva, and his family’s religious rites. He has one secular moment, when he whistles a favourite tune that he heard earlier in the day. It’s the theme of the Sergio Leone Western, The Good The Bad and The Ugly. It’s an odd thing for an Orthodox Jew to adopt. It shows he too has a secular interest that he perforce suppresses. More broadly, the theme from an operatic revenge drama sets us up for Zvia’s climax.
     Zvia’s parallel artistic allusion is the poetry she reads at the poet’s graveside.The poem she breaks down over expresses a neglected woman’s grief and the comfort offered by Death. Like Reuven’s tune, this secular poem suggests being steeped in the Talmud is not enough. We need the solace and the joys of this life too. Whichever group she has killed, she has effectively ended her own life.  

Sunday, January 3, 2016

Baba Joon

The title bears the film’s central paradox. “Baba Joon” in Farsi means either/both “Dear father” and “Dear son.” Despite the apparent conflict between this father and this son, the two are the same. But whereas the father Itzhak gave in to his father and went into the turkey farm business he hated, his son Moti won't. The boy relives his father’s rebellion. But where Itzhak buckled in to his father’s tyranny, here he accepts his son and climactically asks his son's forgiveness. 
Itzhak accepts Moti’s resistance after the grandfather hands him the belt with which to wallop Moti. Itzhak remembers suffering that ignominy himself. The memory jars him into finally understanding and accepting his son. Similarly, when Itszhak kneels to ask his son’s forgiveness he echoes the earlier scene, where he insisted the teacher apologize to Moti for insulting him. 
Perhaps three tensions propel the film. One is between the Farsi and Israeli Jewish communities. The Farsi Jews maintain a secure enclave in their desert village. But there’s a cultural clash behind the Ashkenazi Jewish teacher and the Farsi boy. Indeed, father and son, Itzhak and Moti, share a spirited rebellion when they shuck their kippah and tallis koton  for a spirited drive through the desert. 
That tension between the religious and the secular clearly resonates beyond the plot to Israel in general. The three generations of Morgian go to shule — and a congregant criticises Yitzhak when Moti skips — but they’re a secular family. Brother Darius, returning from America, has no religious connection whatever, as he squirms at the idea of having to participate in the altar service.
So too the central tension between the old way and the new speaks to Israel as much as to this family. As the times have changed the old strategies and customs may no longer apply. In the modern state the old generation cannot impose standards on the younger. When Moti spurns farming — especially of those repulsive turkeys — for his gift at engineering he seems to encapsulate Israel’s development from the agrarian kibbutz to the modern technological state. 
     This film about a tight ethnic community in Israel addresses the challenge to modify old standards and expectations. The brother back from America is especially significant as a figure both liberalizing and disruptive.

Saturday, January 2, 2016

Body

As an early discussion of Jesus — whether he remained Jewish after being baptized — may suggest, Body is a film about faith. Specifically, about the possibility our existence may transcend the physical limits of our lives.
To this end there is a range of corporeal presences. In some shots the characters appear disembodied, reflected in glass. In a pre-title prologue, the police find a man hanging dead from a tree. They assume it’s a suicide, until the man gets up and walks away. A female apparition stops a character’s car. In a parody of the afterlife, a broken waterman floods a cemetery, breaking open the graves. Our coroner hero has to go identify his wife, which he does by her shoes (i.e., her footing, her contact with this earth). 
The coroner is one of the two central characters who deal with people and their physical nature. He prepares the dead for burial. He assumes life ends with death, so he’s puzzled by doors and windows mysteriously opened, inexplicable sounds in the night and ultimately a letter supposedly just written by his dead wife. 
In contrast, the therapist, Anna, treats bulimic girls, the living who are trying to thin themselves out of existence. In her therapy she uses physical exercises and routines, addressing the body in hope of rooting out the psychological sources of the girls’ rejection of their physical nature. As she cites a mentor, “Anyone who loves cannot be sick.”
In addition, though, Anna is a practicing spiritualist. She runs seances, has visions of the dead, records their messages, in effect extending her psychological approach to bulimia into another dimension altogether. From the mind to the soul is a small hop. Anna has believed in the presence of the dead ever since her own young son died — and she felt his presence continuing. As an emblem of her control over the corporeal, Anna keeps a huge pet dog — which she tries to tame and discipline, ineffectually. 
Of course the coroner is suspicious of the spiritualist, even as she is making advances in her treatment of his bulimic daughter, who hasn’t come to terms with her mother’s death. He is eager to leave his daughter in the hospital for Anna’s conventional therapy, but from the spiritualist he withdraws her immediately.
     As it happens, Anna does bring about the coroner’s reconnection to his daughter and her return to joy and life. Anna conducts a seance with them, to contact the wife/mother, but the coroner’s skepticism prevents it. When Anna doses off, snoring, the coroner and his daughter finally unite — in laughter. By failing but only after trying, the spiritualist does bring the two lost souls into harmony. As the closing song summarizes, they’ll “never walk alone” again. 

Son of Saul

Laszlo Nemes’ Son of Saul is one of the most powerful Holocaust films ever made. He avoids the tendency of cheapening the Holocaust by making it a background for an amenable story, like Life is Beautiful and The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas. Instead he presents the Holocaust as the foreground and threads two thin plot lines into it. 
The film is a very difficult experience because it plunges us into an inferno. Where the German extermination machine is usually depicted as machine-like in its efficiency, here the concentration camp is all noise and fire and chaos. It’s late in the Reich’s life, the war is ending and the Nazis are trying to kill as many Jews as quickly as possible. They reopen the pits and overtax the gas chambers. 
Amid the infernal chaos the film presents two quixotic attempts at rebellion. In the collective effort, a group of inmates conspire to try to blow up the camp and escape. They manage a disruption and a handful of Jews run into the forest and find refuge in a barn. But the Nazis track down and destroy them. This is based on an actual event in Auschwitz (unnamed in the film) in 1944. 
In the personal and fictional revolt, one Sonderkommando, Saul, tries to give a murdered boy a proper Jewish burial. The boy survived a mass gassing. Then Saul watches him killed, then resolves upon the symbolic gesture of a Jewish ceremony amidst the Nazi chaos. He tells some the boy is his son, but he makes no paternal response to him. It’s a strictly symbolic gesture, a reaffirmation of Jewish faith and Jewish service to spite the Nazi operation. (The gesture loses power if Saul thinks the boy is his son.)
As a Sonderkommando Saul is in a compromised position. To eke out a few months of extended life he performs the Nazis’ horrible assignments, herding Jews to their death and plundering their possessions for the Reich. On the sly he manages to make constructive bribes of Nazi guards. Gaza Rohrig”s cleft nose is an emblem of the man divided within himself. So his romantic campaign is important for his conscience.
His search for a cooperative rabbi proves futile. Some refuse to officiate, whether out of lost faith or to survive. One actually escapes Saul’s importuning by running into the lake to drown. Saul hauls him out, but the Nazis shoot the rabbi anyway. When Saul finally finds a collaborator he’s not a rabbi after all; he can’t say Kaddish. 
That prayer becomes an emblem of the overturned order of things. Kaddish is the young man’s prayer for the dead parent. Here it becomes a compromised Jew’s attempt to salve his conscience and serve his God and his faith with a symbolic subversion of the Nazis. In this vision of Hell one man tries to do the right thing — but is thwarted. The attempt is its own reward. In his standing up even the failure is a success.
If Saul failed with his dead boy, the film ends with another boy saved and liberated. A clearly Aryan lad comes upon our escapees in the barn. In Saul’s smile at the boy we read a wider acceptance and feeling of humanity. But will the Jews kill him to prevent his betraying them? The Nazi troops come, silence the boy, kill the Jews, but let the boy run free into the wilds. Dead or alive, the young are our hope for survival, for honour, for amendment of the horrors we leave behind. By not ratting out the Jews the blond boy strikes a note of hope.
     Finally, it's important to consider why this film was made now. As the world faces a renewal in antisemitism -- often in the guise of criticizing Israel's government, i.e.,  for defending herself against annihilation -- and as the deniers of the Holocaust spread their lies and multiply throughout Europe, this film is -- in addition to a vital recreation of the past -- a reflection of the current threat to Jews world wide. Art is always about the here and now, even as it purports to be about the then and there.