HOLOCAUST | Big Apple Reviews

THE KEEPER – movie review

Posted on September 25, 2020 by harveycritic

THE KEEPER (Trautmann)
Menemsha Films
Reviewed for Shockya.com & BigAppleReviews.net linked from Rotten Tomatoes by: Harvey Karten
Director: Marcus H. Rosenmüller
Writer: Robert Marciniak, Marcus H. Rosenmüller, Nicholas J. Schofield
Cast: David Kross, Freya Mavor, John Henshaw, Harry Melling, Michael Socha, Dave Johns
Screened at: Critics’ link, NYC, 9/26/20
Opens: October 2, 2020

The Keeper (Trautmann)

Do you think that it’s possible or even praiseworthy to forgive and forget a people for atrocities? Forgiving is difficult. Forgetting is impossible, as it should be. The most impressive sight in Berlin today is the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe or, in German Denkmal für die ermordeten Juden Europas. An entire city block is covered with 2,711 slabs of concrete as a memorial to the Jewish dead that will hopefully last for centuries. Though Turkey refuses to admit to the genocide of Armenians, Germany’s governments have stepped forward to make sure that their own people, even men and women who had nothing to do with the Holocaust or World War II, never forget. Nor should the world.

In the biopic, “The Keeper“ (Trautmann in the original German title), the Bavaria-born director Marcus H. Rosenmüller, whose Beste Zeit is a frothy look at two country girls seeking love from boyfriends and more freedom from parents, takes on a more serious project. Throughout the two-hour biopic, I think that what Rosenmüller and his co-writers Robert Marciniak and Nicholas J. Schofield, want us to keep in mind is this question: Can we/should we forgive the Germans for starting the most catastrophic war the world has known resulting in deaths in the tens of millions and destruction of a good part of Europe? The ethical question is not really answered, though the film glorifies one man, Bert Trautmann (David Kross), who through his good looks, his charming personality, and most of us his incredible talent as a goalie for the Manchester City football (soccer) team encouraged the Brits to feel warmer toward their enemy.

The film is a good, solid, old-fashioned tale with a tasteful sample of archival films of actual soccer games that appear to be won thanks to Trautmann’s athletic ability. But how did a guy who was not only a soldier but a Nazi gain the respect, admiration, and even the love of British people so quickly after the horrors of war? Rosenmüller takes the story step by step in straight time choosing to show the forest if not the trees. What is not described? One is that Trautmann had a daughter by a previous relationship before he married Margaret (Freya Mavor); another is that the marriage ended in divorce, that Trautmann had three wives, and that he died in Spain at the age of eighty-nine. Here is the time line from the film…

Trautmann is in a British prisoner of war camp in Ashton-in-Makerfield, Lancashire, in 1944 toward the end of the war, a place that despite the barking leadership of Sergeant Smythe (Harry Melling) looks more like Stalag 17 than Terezenstadt. The prisoners play football when they are not shoveling shit or doing whatever busywork is required by the camp. Jack Friar (John Henshaw), the manager of a local football team, notes that Trautmann is superb as a goalie, catching everything aimed at the net he guards. He convinces the camp command to let him play for his team, promising to return him daily after each game. Jack’s daughter Margaret, who Trautmann is ordered to help in a general store, is both repelled and fascinated by the German, the disgust taking root when she discovers that Trautmann’s claim that he had no choice other than to serve as a soldier is splintered. She learns that he not only volunteered for the army but had won the Iron Cross.

During the years 1949-1964 Trautmann served as goalie, at first shunned by the team, then razzed by the fans who shout Kraut go home, all of which may make you think of how Jackie Robinson, the first Black man in the majors, was shunned by his fellow Dodgers, the National League threatened with a strike by players with the St. Cardinals. Fans in the stadiuims shouted Go back to the cotton fields.

Because of the old-fashioned nature of the film, dividing time among the prisoner-of-war camp, the football field, and the romantic relationship with Margaret, you may get the impression that this is a Hallmark Hall of Fame type of sentimental piece. You would be partly right. Still, the sincere acting of the players, who look as though they came right out of the forties, jitterbugging to the sound of the Big Bands. There is an able contrast between sombre scenes (the Trautmanns‘ child is killed by a car) and the lighter ones led mostly by John Henshaw’s portrayal of Jack Friar, a tough hombre with a heart of gold. All makes this a movie that’s relevant particularly in light of the protests taking place here in Portland, Louisville, and in big cities around the world. If it seems as though Freya Mavor’s character Margaret changes her attitude too quicky from revulsion to acceptance to love, well, you never know how we human beings can surprise one another by our often unpredictable behavior.

The screener that I used for this review came with English subtitles, and though the Manchester speech is clear enough and even David Kross’s fluent English comes across understandably, the studio should be credited for not assuming that all of us Americans can easily understand our neighbors from across the Atlantic.

Story – B+
Acting – B+
Technical – A-
Overall – B+

THE SONG OF NAMES – movie review

Posted on December 20, 2019 by harveycritic

THE SONG OF NAMES
Sony Pictures Classics
Reviewed for Shockya.com & BigAppleReviews.net linked from Rotten Tomatoes by: Harvey Karten
Director: François Girard
Screenwriter: Jeffrey Caine based on a novel by Norman Lebrecht
Cast: Tim Roth, Clive Owen, Catherine McCormack, Jonah Hauer-King, Gerran Howell, Luke Doyle
Screened at: Sony, NYC, 10/29/19
Opens: December 25, 2019

The Song of Names (2019)

It’s not all that unusual for people to disappear. Men run away from their marriages. Women from small towns bolt, fed up with kinder, küche and kirche. Not long ago Deborah Feldman ran away from her Hasidic Jewish family which she considered to be stifling, disappearing into Greenwich Village, washing her laundry in her memoir “Unorthodox.” “The Song of Names” is likewise about a person who disappears, but this fellow runs not away from the rigidities of religion but more deeply into it. The overriding concept is this: why would a person vanish for thirty-five years, abandoning the foster brother who grew to love him and the foster father who financed and encouraged him and who lost so much money because of the young man’s evaporation?

Through Jeffrey Caine’s adaptation of a novel by Norman Lebrecht by the same name, director François Girard constructs a movie about music and betrayal, building on his own love of music as shown through his “Thirty Short Films About Glenn Gould,” which are vignettes about the pianist’s life, ‘The Red Violin” about the passion created by the instrument over centuries, and the TV episode “Yo-Yo Ma Inspired by Bach.” While “The Song of Names” is clearly about music, Girard is more interested in the emotional bond between two young men who had grown to love each other, and the search by one to find his foster brother who had ruined the life and finances of a British music publisher who had invited him into his home, bought a 284-year-old violin, and died two months after the disastrous disappearance.

This is one of those films that come forth as convoluted given the editor’s frequent changes of eras. The betrayer, Dovid, is played by Luke Doyle aged 9, by Gerran Howell ages 17-21, and thirty-five years later by Clive Owen acting out of his comfort zone as a middle-aged ultra-Orthodox Jew. His foster brother Martin is played by Misha Handley aged 9, by Jonah Hauer-King ages 17-23, and thirty-five years later by Tim Roth. The opening scenes are the most realistic and credible before the story heads off into a not-easily-believed fantasy zone.

Dovid’s father sent his violin prodigy to London to live with a family that includes Martin, who is about the same age and is envious of his new foster-brother’s gifts. Though Martin and Martin’s dad are Christian, the British household honors all Jewish traditions for their new guest, even abandoning their love of breakfast bacon. After a bout of sibling rivalry, the two youths become great friends. When Martin’s father invests in a concert expected to start Dovid’s career as a musician, Dovid disappears completely, leaving the audience at the refund booth and the underwriter heavily in debt. When Martin, now in his mid-fifties, finally tracks Dovid down, he finds out for the first time what happened to his friend. He discovers—as do we in the audience—wholly dubious circumstances of the vanishing act.

In the midst of the credulity-straining tale are some moving scenes. During the German bombing of London, as Dovid takes refuse in the neighborhood air-raid shelter (impressively decked out with scores of sandbags), Dovid pulls out his violin, setting up a competition with a slightly older violinist as though executing a theme and a fugue. On an even more emotional level, the middle-aged Dovid discovers what happened to his parents who had stayed in Poland too late to avoid the Holocaust. A rabbi (Kamil Lemieszewski), doubling as a cantor, sings a song of names whereby the melody makes it easier for him to recall the names of victims who died at Treblinka. Nor can the film be faulted for pulling at the tear ducts at a sight in Treblinka death camp, where the principals walk past stones that memorialize the murdered Jews.

Should we forgive Dovid for bankrupting Martin’s family given his rare talent with the strings, or do we find that difficult given also that Martin has spent his a lifetime fretting about Dovid’s disappearance, heading off from London, traipsing around Poland and New York to solve the puzzle? The movie suffers from the frequent editing to cover the three stages of life and could be served better by a chronological approach. Montréal and Budpest stand in for New York and Warsaw.

Story – C
Acting – B
Technical – B
Overall – C+

NEVER AGAIN IS NOW – movie review

Posted on September 27, 2019 by harveycritic

NEVER AGAIN IS NOW
Ph.D. Productions/Blaze Documentary
Reviewed for Shockya.com & BigAppleReviews.net linked from Rotten Tomatoes by: Harvey Karten
Director: Evelyn Markus
Screenwriter: Evelyn Markus
Cast: Evelyn Markus, Rosa Zeegers, Ben Shapiro, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Qanta Ahmed, Jozias van Aartsen
Screened at: Critics’ link, NYC, 9/26/19
Opens: October 23, 2019

Never Again Is Now Button

This marvelous film has been released under the radar

“Never Again is Now” is expertly edited to combine archival films of Hitler and the war with life in Europe today. After the racist attacks and ultimately the deaths of six millions Jews 1941-45, the slogan “Never Again” was heard throughout the world. Those of us who are Jews and people who have moral firmness in their spines thought that we had heard the last of atrocities like those culminating seven decades ago.

Looking now at Europe, we may find it difficult to imagine that France has been the locale of terrible beatings and bombings against Jewish sites, but it’s even more surprising that anti-Semitic attacks are taking place in the Netherlands, particularly in Amsterdam and the Hague. Most of the violence comes from the growing Muslim populations in Europe, but the traditional citizens of sites like Amsterdam and Paris have sometimes caught the disease. We Geert Wilders, leader of the Dutch Party for Freedom, raining criticism of his country’s Muslims. We generally believe that far right politicians in Europe are themselves anti-Semitic, but in this case he receives a filmed audience from the Jewish director.

The most important concept emerging from the film is from Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a Muslim born in Somalia who had left for Europe and ultimately the United States. When interviewed by Evelyn Markus, the director, who asked whether anti-Semitic incidents would have occurred if there were no Israel, Hirsi Ali delivered a nuanced reply that anti-Semitic sentiment lies buried in some people, with Israel serving merely as an excuse to demonstrate. Hey, it’s not as though everything was peachy for the Jews before the creation of Israel. People have had a need for scapegoats long before the last two centuries and have found victims among minority groups like the Armenians in Turkey, the Rohinga in Myanmar, the Romani in Europe, the Coptic Christians in Egypt, and the Hutus against the Tutsis in Rwanda—among so many others.

Personalizing the film, Evelyn Markus spoke of her parents’ surviving the Holocaust, her mother liberated while on a cattle car heading to a death camp in Eastern Germany. Markus, who notes that she is not only Jewish but gay (her partner, Rosa Zeegers, enjoys a large role, sharing a home with the director for decades.) The two are dismayed that often violent demonstrations against Jews—not Zionists, necessarily, not Israelis, but diaspora Jews—have made their former country unrecognizable thanks to loud demonstrations by Muslims who shout “Kill the Jews wherever they live.” Even non-Jews are marked for assassination if they are critical of Islam. Theo Van Gogh, a Dutch filmmaker critical of Islam in a short doc, was assassinated: stabbed by a jihadist with an anti-Semitic note stuck to his chest. Zeegers, who had passed by a pro-Palestinian demonstration, could scarcely believe the calls of “Hamas, Hamas, Jews to the gas,” a shout which by the way was duplicated even in football stadiums by the visiting teams.

Still it’s refreshing to hear that most Muslims living in Europe and the U.S. go about their business and are not political, and that a few, like the wonderful Ayaan Hirsi Ali, note that violent demonstrators are not in the spirit of Islam, that they are caused by political Islamists. To prove a point—and without extra dialogue—Markus films a sign during a demonstration that calls for Sharia in the Netherlands! So: that’s what you get when you allow too many political Islamists into your country. Instead of gratitude, they would like to overthrow the government, cover women, maybe even ban music, movies, and “Western” culture. It’s almost enough to turn people on the left political spectrum to become conservative.

By quoting the anti-Nazi Dietrich Bonhoeffer “Silence in the face of evil is itself evil,” Markus appears to want us to speak up against, well, evil. People are speaking up, but that does not seem to cut much ice in Europe. At least here in the U.S. where Jews can still walk with kipot on heads, even tallit on their bodies, we could use an administration in D.C. that does not consider the neo-Nazis marching in Charlottesville to be “fine people.”

This documentary is vivid, it’s riveting, even mesmerizing. It’s a call to action but it does not really tell us what we can do to end the growing divisions in our society since free speech makes the situation even worse. Can anyone?

Story – A
Acting – A-
Technical – A-
Overall – A-

THE LAST – movie review

Posted on March 24, 2019 by harveycritic

THE LAST
Plainview Pictures
Reviewed for Shockya.com & BigAppleReviews.net with Rotten Tomatoes link by: Harvey Karten
Director: Jeff Lipsky
Screenwriter: Jeff Lipsky
Cast: Rebecca Schull, Jill Durso, AJ Cedeño, Reed Birney
Screened at: Critics’ link, NYC, 3/16/19
Opens: March 29, 2019

The Last (2019)

Prospective viewers take note. “The Last” features a story that would play better on the stage than on the big screen. Writer-director Jeff Lipsky, whose “Mad Women” features a mother of three daughters who commits a crime of conscience and becomes radicalized in prison, segues into a new movie about one woman who is mad-insane (arguably, at one time), another two who are mad (angry as hell and rightly so), and two men whose views about where to put the great grandma are radically different. Since “The Last” is rich in dialogue, including a stunning forty-five minute monologue by the 90-year-old actress Rebecca Schull as the 92-year-old Claire, could easily fit on an off-Broadway stage with a little sand to represent a beach.

Here is yet another take on the Holocaust, the greatest crime of all time. “The Last” is not likely to be the last look at the atrocity, nor should it be. Lipsky puts an elderly woman on the front burner, rare enough in the movies these days, a character who is quite different from the person her many-generation family thinks she is. The film’s advertising notes that she will reveal some details of her life three-score and ten years ago that has a sobering effect on her family. However, no film critic should destroy the suspense by revealing the coup d’ètat, nor should readers who suspect the revelation to be a shattering read any commentary on the film that exposes this key feature.

With a stunning performance from nonagenarian Rebecca Schull, perhaps best known for her role in the TV comedy “Wings” about two brothers trying to run an airline from Nantucket, “The Last” opens on the kind of Rosh HaShanah service in which Josh (AJ Cedeño), wearing kippah and identifying as Modern Orthodox, challenges the group by revealing that he does not really believe in God. Yes, there may have been a burning bush, but not one that was lit up by a Divine Bic. Yes, the Red Sea may have seemed to part, but perhaps the good guys escaped from Pharaoh’s army by walking on the rocks. Despite Josh’s skepticism, his wife Olivia (Jill Durso), has undergone a conversion to Judaism, not without feeling embarrassed by her nudity after dunking in the purifying Mikveh baths.

A Mikveh would have been better suited for Claire, who is the least pure family relic, and who in the film’s key middle delivers one of the longest monologues ever to appear on celluloid rather than its more appropriate place on the legit stage. Claire’s tale is of her escape from Germany during the rise of Hitler and her attainment of U.S. citizenship thanks to a marriage of convenience with one Moishe. Her granddaughter Melody (Julie Fain Lawrence), married to would-be graphic novelist Harry (Reed Birney), can identify strongly with Claire, given that Melody lost both of her parents in the war.

When Claire reveals that she is terminally ill and has booked passage to Oregon for a gentle end to her active life, the stage (or rather, the screen), is set for yet another surprise that leads Olivia into a convulsive tantrum, wracked with psychic pain.

While you might expect “The Last” to be targeted to a Jewish audience—it did, in fact, play at a Jewish center prior to its March 29th opening this year—there is every reason for an audience of all faiths or none to find universality in the plot. Despite the low level of histrionics in favor of some carefully written dialogue, “The Last” is a daring film that can be appreciated by a select, sophisticated audience.

Story – B
Acting – B+
Technical – B
Overall – B

SOBIBOR – movie review

Posted on March 24, 2019 by harveycritic

SOBIBÓR
Samuel Goldwyn Films
Reviewed for Shockya.com & BigAppleReviews.net by: Harvey Karten
Director: Konstantin Khabenskiy
Screenwriter: Anna Chernakova, Michael Edelstein, Ilya Vasiliev, based on the book by Ilya Vasiliev: “Alexander Pechersky: Breakthrough to Immortality”
Cast: Konstantin Khabenskiy, Christopher Lambert, Mariya Kozhevnikova, Michalina Olszanska, Philippe Reinhardt
Screened at: Critics’ link, NYC, 3/7/19
Opens: March 29, 2019

If you travel to Poland, you will do well to take the day trip from Krakow to Auschwitz, certainly not because there is entertainment to be found there but because the most notorious death camp and its promotion by Germany is part of what is now called grief tourism. The German government has been surprisingly transparent in its vast campaign of owning up what the Nazi government did to the Jews they arrested, most of whom either died in the camps or were summarily shot on location. If the camp at Sobibór is not among the most visited camps today ,it is because unlike with Auschwitz, the Nazis government tore down the camp in 1943 after a dramatic escape by prisoners, making it part of the adjoining forest.

Konstantin Khabenskiy, who directs and stars in “Sobibór” takes on the role of the actual hero, Alexander Pechersky, who led one of the only two successful escapes from concentration camps, standing in as one answer to naïve accusations such as “Why didn’t the Jews do more to fight against the enemy?” Obviously given the way that the guards at the camps crushed not only the spirit of the inmates but did their best to work them to death, Jews were generally in no condition to put up a fight. Given this situation, you can’t blame Russia for commemorating the heroic uprising led by Pechersky, though under an anti-Semitic Stalin, information was kept quiet only because the rebellion was led by Jews. Happily things are different now as we witness the box office success of Khabenskiy’s film, which has among the most gory, bloody scenes of chaos month after month involving German officers living on Cognac and laughing at the humiliations they visit upon the poor prisoners.

Ramunus Greicius films entirely in Vilnius County, Lithuania, standing in for the Polish city of Sobibór which lies southeast of both Warsaw and Treblinka, hugging the border with Ukraine. With a cast including scores of Lithuanian extras, Anna Chernakova, Michael Edelstein and Ilya’s Vasiliev screenplay based on the book “Alexander Pechersky” by Ilya Vasiliev takes us first to the railway where Jews being resettled have allegedly been treated fairly well on the transport to cover up the goal of the Germans. As they depart, they are told “Welcome to your new life,” but instead, most of the women are forced to strip naked and march into the “showers” only to be gassed with carbon monoxide. The men and women who are kept alive are made busy with sewing and chopping, their hard work met with strange rewards including one attempted rape, nonstop floggings, setting Jews up as horses to run the officers around.

As a result of one attempted escape early on, the officers order one inmate of every group of ten to be shot, to discourage further escapes and to demand that the Jews tell the Nazis of any future plan. Among the prisoners is one kapo who is crueler to his fellow Jews than any German, calling them “kikes,” and bringing clear definition to the term “self-hating Jew.” The camp commandant, Karl Frenzel (Christiopher Lambert) does little to discipline the men, even encouraging them to shoot Jews for sport and, in one instance, to allow Berg (Mindaugas Papinigis) to pour alcohol on one prisoner and set him on fire.

Most of the story deals with life in the camps, which the officers find to their liking being the sadists that they are, nobody forcing restraint while the Jews are beaten so regularly that we wonder how they are able to kill eleven officers, duping them by saying that they have beautiful Parisian leather jackets to show them in their quarters and then stabbing or shooting them. It is only during the final twenty minutes that the actual escape takes place, as prisoners take the pistols and rifles that they capture and make their way into the forest. Slow-motion photography adds drama to the narrative. Regrettably, of the six hundred taking part in the mad dash to freedom, most perished, either killed by guards or exploded in the mine fields surrounding the camp. Only 58 are known to have survived, while some are killed by locals and some by Ukrainian guards.

Because the film so boldly displays the misery dished out to the Jews, who never know whether they would survive the day, it stands as a great tribute to Alexander Pechersky without whose leadership all might have been either killed or too petrified even to attempt escape. English subtitles provided for languages spoken: Russian, Polish, German, Dutch, Yiddish

Story – B+
Acting – B+
Technical – A-
Overall – B+

WHO WILL WRITE OUR HISTORY – movie review

Posted on December 31, 2018 by harveycritic

WHO WILL WRITE OUR HISTORY
Abramorama
Reviewed for Shockya.com and BigAppleReviews.net by: Harvey Karten
Director: Roberta Grossman
Screenwriter: Roberta Grossman, Samuel Kassow from Kassow’s book “Who Will Write Our History? Rediscovering a Hidden Archive from the Warsaw Ghetto”
Cast: Jowitz Budnik, Piotr Glowacki, Piotr Jankowski, Wojciech Zielinski, Karolina Gruzka, Bartlomiej Kotschedoff, Gera Sandler
Screened at: Critics’ link, NYC, 1/1/19
Opens: January 18, 2019

We in the U.S. are living now in a time that the printed word has been downgraded, where texting and sexting are the language of youth, and where the New York Times is denigrated by our country’s chief office holder as “failing” and full of “fake news.” How refreshing it is, then, that a film and the book from which it is adapted honors the word, whether in English, or Yiddish, or Hebrew or Polish. “Who Will Write our History” commemorates and even idolizes a few remarkable people shut inside the Warsaw ghetto during the Nazi conquest of Poland who dedicated the rest of their brief, remaining lives to writing an archive of material. The material, mostly of the printed word, includes some pictures, so that people in London could be made aware of the delivering of Polish Jewish into a gated neighborhood ghetto followed by their mass murder. The sixty thousand pages of first-person testimony were buried after the ghetto and, indeed, much of the entire city was burned to the ground and found only recently by groups of workers with some documentation presumably buried under the Chinese Embassy in Poland’s capital.

Using archival film taken mostly by Nazis who, by photographing Jews wasting away with starvation and afflicted with lice and disease, employed the films as propaganda to show the world that the Jews are filthy and lice-infected—as though the heartless conquering people had nothing to do with their miserable and desperate condition. The source material, from Samuel Kassow’s book “Who Will Write our History,” cannot be faulted as the author, who lectures on Russian and Jewish history, received a commentary from the New Republic magazine “May be the most important book about history that anyone will ever read.” (Available from Amazon for $17.04.)

The documentary mixes in contemporary footage in full color as actors taking the parts of journalists, scholars and community leaders who go about their secret work of writing voluminous accounts of the greatest crime of the last century. Emanuel Ringelblum was the leader of the group, a historian who gave the project the code name of Oyneg Shabes, determined to puncture German lies with the pen while lacking the sword—at least until the uprising of those Jews remaining in the ghetto on April 19, 1943.

The project is directed, written and produced by Roberta Grossman, whose passion for social justice is easily understood by looking at her previous works. “Seeing Allred,” which she co-directed, takes on the recent testimony of sexual assaults, while her “Hava Nagila” is a virtual travelogue of the famous Jewish song. For this film she employs the voice of Joan Allen, whose narrative offerings include “Rickover: the Birth of Nuclear Power” Catherine Senesh from a movie about Hannah Senesh, who was captured by the Nazis while trying to rescue Jews during the war. Going from the sublime to the ridiculous, narrator Adrien Brody used his narrative voice in the past as the mouse in “Fantastic Mr. Fox.”

Focusing on the story of Emanuel Ringelblum and his Oyneg Shabes archive, writer-director Grossman honors the determination of writers to become eyewitnesses to the destructive criminality of the Nazis, indicting the Jewish police as well for their desire to save their lives by treating other Jews with the same brutality as the Germans. What emerges from the writings is not simply a narrative history, as the sixty writers also knocked

out diaries, essays, jokes, poems and songs. Most significant is that they depict the Jews from the Jewish point of view so the world should see German propaganda as little more than the lies of a craven people.

This is a major piece of documentary filmmaking, the scholars and filmmakers working for six months to prepare the actual shooting, while the words spoken by the actors are the very words that emerge from the printed material. In 1999 three document collections from Poland were included by UNESCO’s Memory of the World Register: the works of Chopin (ironically enough considering the composer’s virulent anti-Semitism), the works of Copernicus, and the Oyneg Shabes Archive.

Some may argue that the special effects and reenactments threaten the veracity of the material but Grossman makes sure that every word spoken in the recreations, every emotion, boldly supplements the amazing collection of archival celluloid, much of which I for one had never seen before despite my aim to see every film made that tries to make sense of the Holocaust.

Story – A-
Acting – B+
Technical – A
Overall – A-

THE WALDHEIM WALTZ – movie review

Posted on October 4, 2018 by harveycritic

THE WALDHEIM WALTZ

Menemsha Films
Reviewed by: Harvey Karten
Director: Ruth Beckermann
Screenwriter: Ruth Beckermann
Screened at: Critics’ link, NYC, 9/24/18
Opens: October 19, 2018
Waldheims Walzer (2018)
Pete Seeger once sang a Tom Paxton song, a section going like this:

What did you learn in school today, dear little boy of mine,
What did you learn in school today, dear little boy of mine.
I learned our country must be strong, it’s always right and never wrong,
Our leaders are the finest men, and we elect them again and again,
And that’s what I learned in school today, that’s what I learned in school.

Don’t you think it’s true that in America all our leaders are the finest men? Grade school optimism of this nature would not fare well in other countries, as their presidents and prime ministers are not as saintly as ours. Take the bottom-feeder that came out of Austria. No, not that one. Think of Kurt Waldheim, Wouldn’t it have been great if that war criminal, that Viennese vulture, spent his life baking sachertortes instead of taking part in Nazi paramilitary activities? Instead the one-time president of Austria repeatedly states throughout this documentary that he was just a soldier drafted by Germany to serve on the Russian front. What he conceals while at the same time virtually shooting himself in the foot by his denials, that he knew nothing about the shooting of Serb civilians one hundred meters from his office in Yugoslavia nor did he have any knowledge of the deportation of 12,000 Jews from Salonika, Greece during the years of World War II particularly 1942-43.

Maybe he lied, maybe he didn’t. But there is enough doubt sowed here to have caused the Austrian voters to demur about casting ballots for him when he ran for president in 1986. He won on the second ballot with 53.8% of the vote.

Filmmaker Ruth Beckermann, who has considerable experience with documentaries, is adept at dramas as well. Before “The Waldheim Waltz” she traveled across Europe and the Mediterranean to unfold “The Dreamed Ones,” focused on chance encounters with the likes of Nigerian asylum seekers in Sicily, an Arab musician in Galilee, nationalists drunk on beer in Vienna, and veiled young women trying to cross a busy road in Alexandria. She provides voiceover narration throughout “The Waldheim Waltz,” which concentrates on the 1986 presidential election, showing archival film from the forties and from Waldheim’s tenure as UN Secretary General. One must wonder at the kind of world that existed in 1972 to allow this fellow, later banned from travel in the U.S. for lying about his service in the S.A., or Sturmabterlung, the Nazi paramilitary force.

The most dramatic incident occurs when, during a street confrontation between pro-Waldheim people on the street and those opposed, a member of the former group yells to Beckermann and to all around gathered to watch the action, “You belong in the ground, you Jewish swine.” Then to another in the crowd, “Are you a Jewboy? A Jewboy?” This antisemitism is nothing new for Austrians. To this day, they consider themselves citizens who suffered just like the Jews under the Nazis since the Anschluss, or annexation of their country to Germany. The reality is that crowds turned out to cheer wildly for Hitler and generally to show that the majority, perhaps, were quite comfortable attaching themselves to another German-speaking country.

We can’t fail to add that Waldheim’s “memory loss” or “amnesia” about his wartime activities brings to mind similar situations that have arisen here in the U.S. as politicians, grilled by journalists and congressional committees to ‘fess up about shady dealings in their past, have “no recollection.” This is not to say that any office holder or candidate for high-level jobs is on the same base level as was a member of a Nazi paramilitary organization. This is just the way that we, watching local politics about the Kavanaugh hearings in particular, can have an AHA! moment. This is what dirty politics is all about. It’s no wonder that so many of our citizens have given up on participating even once every two years in the simple act of casting ballots, given that neither Tweedledum nor Tweedledee will be able to solve or even to bother understanding the real problems that all but the richest one percent face.

Story – B
Acting – B
Technical – B
Overall – B

WHERE HANDS TOUCH – movie review

Posted on September 9, 2018 by harveycritic

WHERE HANDS TOUCH

Vertical Entertainment
Reviewed by: Harvey Karten
Director: Amma Asante
Screenwriter: Amma Asante
Cast: Amandla Stenberg, George MacKay, Abbie Cornish, Christopher Eccleston, Tom Sweet
Screened at: Critics’ link, NYC, 8/24/18
Opens: September 9, 2018 at Toronto Film Festival

Amandla Stenberg in Where Hands Touch (2018)

Once you get past the absurdity of Germans’ speaking only English in a film that has a little French spoken in the final scene, you realize that this Holocaust story is one that to my knowledge had never before been explored. “Where Hands Touch” examines the life of 15-year-old Leyna (Amandla Stenberg) who comes of age by having her first sexual experience with an “Aryan” member of the Hitler Youth. To the young woman’s discredit, she does not have a problem with her liaison with Lutz (George MacKay), a young man who does not try to get off the hook by pretending that every kid had to accommodate himself to the Nazi program and join the organization. He is so loyal to the Nazi regime that time and again states that he might even try to be assigned to the Russian front, and who is protected by his father (Christopher Eccleston) who assigns him to work in a concentration camp.

For her part, Leyna is protected from persecution, at least for a time, by her mother (Abbie Cornish), an “Aryan” German who had had a relationship with an African, thereby producing a mixed-race child.

Amma Asante, a London-based actor, screenwriter, and director who was awarded the MBE (Member of the Order of the British Empire) in the 2017 Queen’s Birthday Honours List for her services to Film, is known by her fans largely for her 2004 film “A Way of Life.” That story is about a 17-year-old girl who is paranoid that a Turkish neighbor is plotting to take away her 6-months’ old baby. Asante, therefore, is in her métier by this lataest story requires no paranoia to realize that Leyna is really in serious trouble. Her mother is sensible, as mothers often are when dealing with their daughters’ passions, doing her best to have her daughter fade into invisibility. That she is having an affair with a die-hard Nazi troubles her, while her daughter, passion trumping rationality, plunges headline into danger.

So much is known about the Nazi persecution of Jews that we overlook the fact that Afro-German professionals found it almost impossible to work in Germany under Hitler. They were forbidden to have sexual relations and marriage to Aryans, they were called “Rhineland bastards,” and were subjected to undergo forced sterilization. Yet they were better off than Jews and Romani, segregated with a plan to make them disappear by having the 25,000 women of color disappear after the present generation.

“Where Hands Touch” does give us insight into the Holocaust as it applies to women who are not Jews but whose papers were somehow not in order. In the situation here, Leyland’s mother is taken away for producing a mixed race child while her daughter is confined to a concentration camp located not far from a neighboring facility where Jews are murdered and sent up in smoke.

The film bills itself not particularly as a coming-of-age story, though Leyland’s virginity is lost and the girl is made pregnant by her Nazi lover. Instead, I believe the writer-director wants us to look at the work as principally a romance, albeit a love affair dominated by the political and social order of 1944-1945. The film has received some backlash, including a screed by Tara Nafisa, a Nigerian critic who is incensed that we are “expected to develop a special bond with a mixed-race girl who sees past the blood in his hands, the emblems on his uniforms, and the philosophy of the association he represent.” However let’s face facts. Leyland, who is the principal character, is not meant to be a shining example of a caring, compassionate woman, but is rather limited by her tender age, driven by passions that her mother fears. In the same sense, her young man, despite his love of Germany, partially to overlook his ideology, which would make similar people avoid and even denigrate women of mixed race. He is willing to risk his standing with the society of his day and become alienated from his father. There are no saints in this story with the possible exception of the girl’s mother, but rather a basket of flawed personalities, some, like the boy’s father, who would fit easily into a basket of deplorables. The same could, of course, be said of the extras, the Nazi officers who bark orders, demand right and left that citizens produce papers, shooting some in the back as easily as they could put a hook on a fish.

Ultimately the picture is flawed by a script that is both saccharine and simplistic, the British actors delivering their lines in a stilted manner. The dialogue between Leyland’s mom and the girl, and between the Aryan and her father could remind us of the long-winded advice that Shakespeare’s Polonius gives to Laertes, but there is nothing in the conversations that transcends the banal.
So give Ms. Asante the credit for exposing us to a segment of the Holocaust not before treated in a film that, despite being based on a true story, does not come across as credible. Remi Adefarasin films in Belgium, moments of melodrama aided by Ann Chmelewsky’s music.

Story – C
Acting – C+
Technical – B-
Overall – C+

A BAG OF MARBLES – movie review

Posted on March 18, 2018 by harveycritic

A BAG OF MARBLES (Un sac de billes)

Gaumont
Reviewed by: Harvey Karten
Director: Christian Duguay
Screenwriter: Alexandra Geismar, Jonathan Allouche w/ collaboration of Laurent Zeitoun and based on the graphic novel by Joseph Joffo and Vincent Bailly
Cast: Patrick Bruel, Dorian Le Clech, Batyste Fleurial Palmieri, Elsa Zylberstein
Screened at: Critics’ link, NYC, 2/8/18
Opens: March 23, 2018

This narrative film based on a graphic novel by Joseph Joffo and Vincent Bailly purportedly relating true experiences takes place in Paris and Nice, exhibiting a phase of the Holocaust as seen through the eyes of ten-year-old Joseph (Dorian Le Clech) and his big brother Maurice Joffo (Batyste Fleurial). “A Bag of Marbles” includes some shots of unprovoked brutality, although if you’re seen enough Holocaust films and read enough books on the tragic era, you’d be naïve to think that this represents Germans and some French acting on their full-pledged antisemitism. The director, Christian Duguay, has a resume packed with TV episodes including one called “Human Trafficking,” about the brutality of kidnappers who sell young women into prostitution.

An authentic performance by Patrick Bruel in the role of the boys’ father is the highlight, a man who runs a barber shop in Paris that caters only to Jews (who in 1942 would not be allowed to patronize a shop run by Christians). For me a big surprise was that two German soldiers among the occupation troops in France’s capital visited the barber as customers, and that Roman, the boy’s father, freely stated to the two customers that “everyone in the shop is Jewish.” I had figured that by 1942 the windows would be broken, a Star of David would be painted on the walls, and the Jews would have to go immediately into hiding.

Since the film involves the travels of the two brothers without their parents to a freer area in the south, largely on foot but sometimes by hitched rides, you could this a road-and-buddy pic, involving various people, mostly friendly and talkative. Among the events encountered by young and naïve Joseph, who could barely believe that the lives of Jews were in danger, and his more mature, older brother Maurice, is one in which the lads, traveling alone on a train heading south toward Nice which was governed by the French Vichy regime under Petain, are terrified when about to be confronted by the authorities asking for papers (they had none). They came under the immediate protection of a priest, one of two gents of the cloth who would protect the identity of the two. Other events include their presence in a training program of youths expected to fight for Germany, wherein the boys feign Catholicism, and another in which Joseph, following the counsel of his father who literally beat into him that he must always deny his Jewishness, worked for an anti-Semitic bookseller for six months without guessing the identity of his employee. This middle-aged shop owner, who would be dealt with by the Resistance after liberation, blamed the Jews for the war, a classic Big Lie of the Nazi regime, and who furthermore states that the real enemy of France is England, not Germany.

With a solid supporting role by Elsa Zilberstein as Anna Joffo, the boys’ mother, “Bag of Marbles” is yet another film on the horrors of the Nazi regime with its own particular niche. It should be required viewing by those who tend to believe whatever governments are telling them, with a manifesto that should read “Question authority: Trust No One.” This especially in view of the rightward movement of several Western countries whose naïve citizens are going along with the hatred spewed by candidates for government. Beware of anyone with statements about neo-Nazis and white supremacists in our own country that there are fine people among them.

Story – B+
Acting – B+
Technical – A-
Overall – B+

PAST LIFE – movie review

Posted on December 30, 2017 by harveycritic

PAST LIFE (original title Ha-Khata’im, “The Sin”)

Orion/ Samuel Goldwyn Films
Reviewed by: Harvey Karten, CompuServe Film d-based on Rotten Tomatoes
Grade: B+
Director: Avi Nesher
Written by: Avi Nesher
Cast: Nelly Tagar, Joy Rieger, Evgenia Dodina, Doron Tavory, Tom Avni, Rafael Stachowiak, Muli Schulman, Katarzyna Gniewkowska
Screened at: Critics’ link, NYC, 3/6/17
Opens: June 2, 2017

That films revolving around the Holocaust continue to be made—good ones at that—is a sign that the tragedy ranks as among the most revealing of the pure savagery that can be attributed to humankind. When innocent people, including babies, can be imprisoned, starved, shot, gassed, hanged, none of which has any relevance to winning a war, we’re dealing once again with the truism that human beings, unlike wild animals, are the only creatures who murder without conscience.

“Past Life” has only a few flashbacks to incidents in which Christians, whether for money or for pure moral fiber, risked their lives by hiding Jews in their cellars from 1941 to 1945. The major part of the film takes place in 1977, the year that Anwar Sadat of Egypt went to the Israeli Knesset (parliament) to offer peace between his country and Isarel. For that he was killed by his own people. The action is filmed in Germany and Poland and four languages are spoken: Hebrew (primarily), German, English and Polish, all under the direction of scripter Avi Nesher, whose impressive résumé dates back to 1978 with “Ha Lahaka,” about a troupe of young Israelis in an entertainment unit at the time of the Yom Kippur war.

There is some beautiful music in “Past Life” as well, given that the focus is on Sephi Milch (Joy Rieger), the principal singer and student in a Jerusalem conservatory. Her older sister, Nana Milch-Kotler (Nelly Tagar), is married and envious of Sephi’s talent. Balancing the story of the sisters with allegations of a crime committed by their physician father Baruch Milch (Doron Tavory) during the Holocaust in Poland, Nesher essentially projects two plots so skillfully that we never consider that he is trying to push two separate movies on us. Most of the suspense begins with an outburst at a concert in West Berlin by a Polish woman, Agnieszka Zielinska (Katarzyna Gniewkowska), who squeezes Sephi’s arm and proclaims that the young singer’s father is a murderer. She is restrained by her son, Thomas zielinski (Rafael Stachowiak), a famous German composer who visits Jerusalem on a cultural exchange and develops a bond with Sephi.

What’s the story, then? Is the doctor a killer who does not deserve to be forgiven? And is the professor at the Academy, Uri Lotan (Muli Shulman), being sexist when he puts down singer-composer Sephi with the comment, “After all, has there even been a truly significant or well-known female classical composer?” The former makes this is mystery that unfolds ever so gradually, while the latter adds this film to the feminist file, the woman determined to show the male teacher how wrong he is.

Now, not even a radical feminist can deny that sometimes women can not only disagree with one another but could harbor intense envy. The long-term jealousy of Nana, an intellectual who is easily the more vocal of the siblings, needs to resolve her conflict while the quieter, but angelic singer Sephi, does nothing to foster that jealousy other than using her talent as both singer and composer as well she should.

The plot lines require audience focus as one can become distracted, as the two plots zigzag about. There is much to admire in the period costumes, the automobiles, the various locations in Germany and Poland, and especially the high production values that go into a considerable segment of actual singing and instrumental accompaniment. Though “Past Life” might be considered by some to be “of Jewish interest,” there is surely much that is universal in its themes of envy, secrets of past lives, and murderous hostility.

Unrated. 110 minutes. © Harvey Karten, Member, New York Film Critics Online
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PARADISE – movie review

Posted on December 29, 2017 by harveycritic

PARADISE (Ray)

Film Movement
Reviewed by: Harvey Karten, CompuServe Film d-based on Rotten Tomatoes
Grade: A-
Director: Andrey Konchalovsky
Written by: Andrey Konchalovsky, Elena Kiseleva
Cast: Yuliya Vysotskaya, Peter Kurth, Viktor Sukhorukov, Philippe Duquesne, Thomas Darchinger
Screened at: Critics’ link, NYC, 10/2/17
Opens: October 6, 2017In the final paragraph of Charles Dickens’ “A Tale of Two Cities,” Sidney Carton does a far, far better thing than he had ever done before. Even during the hellish times of the French Revolution’s Reign of Terror, it’s possible for people destined for the guillotine to be saved by a heroic act. A similar situation pops up during the concluding moments of Andrey Konchalvsky’s “Paradise,” which has the original title of “Ray.” Konchalovsky (who was born two days before me), is in his métier with his wartime movie “Paradise.” In 2002 his “House of Fools,” aka “Dom durakov,” takes on the Chechen war when a lack of staff forces residents of a psychiatric institution to fend for themselves.

“Paradise” deals with what could only be called the psychopathic ideology of Nazism, with its belief that Jews must be eliminated from Europe so that the “Aryan race” could construct a paradise on earth. Much of the action takes place in a concentration camp in 1942-44, but this is not a straight, chronological account. Instead, Konchalovsky, using his own script together with that of his co-writer Elena Kiseleva, changes venues and time periods regularly, using 35mm footage and, for a look of authenticity, 16mm stock, all is in black-and-white. He even has the 16mm film show deterioration with time, and what’s more slows the momentum of the epic work frequently as though pitching commercials in the midst of the story to have the major characters talk to the camera, or to us in our theater seats.

Holocaust dramas hardly make rare visits to the cinema, but this one, which uses Russian, French, and German dialogue, is an original, in large part because of the convention of actors’ speaking directly to the camera. What’s more, it’s filled with moments that can bring tears to those in the audience with a sensitivity to the tragic and frankly unbelievable goings-on as Germany, not content with marching throughout Europe and into the Soviet Union, diverts attention from the fighting to destroy the Jewish people.

The principal characters are Olga (Yuliva Vysotskaya), Helmut (Christian Clauss), and Jules (Christian Duquesne), all of whom appear individually to talk to an interviewer or to us in the audience. Olga is a Russian aristocrat who is arrested in occupied France for hiding Jewish children, and is immediately questioned by Jules, a French traitor who works for the Nazis as a police interrogator, responding to Olga’s seductive manner. But Jules is assassinated by the French Resistance before he could do anything to save her. She winds up in a concentration/extermination camp under the cruel Obersturmbannführer Hans Krause (Peter Kurth). She’s in luck even there, as Helmut (Christian Clauss), promoted in the Nazi ranks as auditor for the camp with the authority to condemn officers caught siphoning money and valuables, had been in love with her a decade ago while both were in an Italian resort.

Highlights include Helmut’s interview with Heinrich Himmler (Victor Sukhorukov), his ego and promotion allowing him to consider himself an übermench, much like his pal in the camp, with whom he has sometimes drunken, but always insightful chats. With the war approaching an end, some make plans to flee to Nueva Germania, or Paraguay, but while some are of the opinion that the whole Nazi enterprise is a fool’s paradise, Helmut tells the camera that he has no reason to atone for anything—particularly given his plan to get Olga safely to Switzerland.

We know from many other films about the dreadful conditions of the prisoners but this film concentrates on the women, who are so degraded that as soon as one of their number dies, a fight erupts to seize her boots, cigarettes, or anything else that might make their lives a little better. The film is testament to the folly of thinking that humankind can make a
paradise on earth. Nazism, with its emphasis on racial purity, and Communism, with its belief that people can be forced to submit to absolute class leveling, are extreme experiments that simply have never worked. As the Roman poet Quintus Horatius Flaccus reminded us in 65 B.C, “Naturam expellas furca, tamen usque revenit.” “You can drive nature out with a pitchfork, she will nevertheless come back.

1945 – movie review

Posted on December 29, 2017 by harveycritic

1945

Menemsha Films
Reviewed by: Harvey Karten, 411 Celeb
Grade: B+
Director: Ference Török
Written by: Ference Török. Gábor T. Szántó adapted from Szántó’s short story “Homecoming”
Cast: Péter Rudolf, Bence Tasnádi, Tamás Szabó Kimmel, Dóra Sztarenki, Ági Szirtes, József Szarvas, Eszter Nagy-Kálózy, Iván Angelus, Marcell Nagy, Miklós B. Szekely, Gyorgy Somhegyi
Screened at: Critics’ link, NYC, 10/10/17
Opens: November 1, 2017

When two Orthodox Jews, Sámuel Hermann (Iván Angelus) and his son Sámuel Hermann fia (Marcell Nagy) walk into a Hungarian village in 1945, people everywhere stare at them, wondering whether these two are the Jews whose pharmacy was taken over by Christians István (Péter Rudulf) and son Árpád (Bence Tasnádi) and whose comfortable home was commandeerd by Bandi (József Szarvas) and his wife Kustár Andrásné, who have kept the menorah and Jewish Art. While some residents might not know the recent history of the village and look upon the two visitors as simply strange intruders, others had more materialistic worries in mind. European history notes that when Nazis removed Jews from cities and villages and sent them to the camps, their property was not put into storage, but was transferred to Christians, some of whom feared their status as legal owners would come up short when the original deeds were produced. This theft of Jewish property became one of the reasons that Jews returning form the camps to Poland, for example, led to the execution of some hapless survivors just after the conclusion of World War 2.

“1945,” filmed by Elemér Ragályi in black-and-white with a sad musical score by Tibor Szemzö, comes across as a faithful recreation of a peasant community, in this case with a whorish young woman Kisrózxsi (Dóra Sztarenki) who enjoys a conjugal visit with her former fiancé Jancsi (Tamás Szabó Kimmer) on the very day she is to marry Árpád, the pharmacy manager. In fact some residents actually feel remorse, in one case overwhelming, by Bandi, the town drunk, who had years ago ratted out the Jews to the Nazis.

While the overriding theme involves the various feelings that townspeople have toward two they consider interlopers from another world, director Ferenc Török indulges in a terrifically nuanced look at what could be a typical Eastern European village from another time. The tensions felt by the residents are in many ways not unlike those that anxiety-filled urban people must contend with—envy, resentment of those they consider better in some ways, though occasionally even some friendliness. Bandi—who orders brandy by the bottle in part because he’s the town drunk but in this case to cover up his remorse at cooperating with the Nazis—might be almost as willing as the young pharmacy manager to permit some justice by giving the returning Jews the property that is legally theirs. Some mystery is provided not only to the villagers but to us in the theater audience about the wooden crate that the visitors are transporting to the site of their previous home. The rumor is that they are carrying perfume and creams to restock the pharmacy, the very store that convinces pretty Kisrózsi to abandon her muscular boyfriend for the life of a merchant, which she would acquire through marrying the schlubby son of the town clerk and magistrate.

Director Török is well known in Hungarian film circles, though you might not guess he would direct a serious film like this given his 2001 “Moscow Square,” about high school kids who don’t give a hoot about Hungarian politics as they are into parties, girls, and graduation. With an adaptation of Gábor T. Szántó’s short story “Homecoming,” this latest venture is targeted to cinema buffs who do not require fast action but often prefer a meditative, thoughtful, deeply-felt story. The film played at several international festivals and took a prestigious award at the Jerusalem Film Festival.

In Hungarian with English subtitles.

Unrated. 91 minutes. © Harvey Karten, Member, New York Film Critics Online
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