My Polish Honeymoon

Writer/director Élise Otzenberger gives her Holocaust-observance film a woman’s angle. The newlywed couple travels to Poland to commemorate the 75th anniversary of the eradication of the Jews from the small town from which husband Adam’s grandfather came. But it’s wife Anna, not he, who insists on the trip. 

More importantly, the primary healing from the experience is between Anna and her mother. Their relationship begins in mutual abrasion, as unsettling as the mother's IBS and the daughter's squeamishness. This is the family's version of the upset body politic.
When the mother disturbingly pops up in Poland, the eruption turns positive because she brings information about her own mother’s past there. When they visit the site of the grandmother’s old home the formerly combative women bond over their lost history. The mother establishes a new connection with her daughter through realizing her neglect of her own mother’s history. She now imagines what she had failed to learn.  

The primary theme is focusing one’s identity. This plays out in the framing use of Hava Nageela. Its initial appearance is an instrumental version which — like the Chopin Nocturne that follows — we recognize but have to pause before we Name that Tune. At the end we get the version with lyrics, which asserts its identity. Also,the lyrics make it more bouyant and celebratory, reflecting the two women’s growth. 

Adam and Anna are both prone to emotional outbursts. Adam bristles from Jewish self-consciousness in that once flagrantly antisemitic country. He’s sensitive to others’ sensing he’s Jewish and belligerently asserts that identity.  

He has ample cause, given the apparent monetizing of Holocaust guilt, with tours of Auschwitz advertised in glossy pamphlets, a bus offering tours of Schindler’s Factory and school kids touring the plundered remains of Jewish cemeteries. These scenes add a tone of black comedy to the serious issues.

Anna’s sensitivity centers on the challenges to her recovering her past. Mainly it’s her complete break from her grandmother, her lack of any grip on that history. This need takes comic form when she drunkenly explodes at the fine restaurant’s profaning of her traditional meat-based borscht.              For the past is, indeed, another country, as L.P. Hartley observes in The Go-Between. They do things differently there, even when the modern world veers dangerously close to repeating its nightmare.