Phoenix

A German-Jewish Holocaust survivor, Nelly Lenz, (the extraordinary Nina Hoss) comes back to Berlin after the war, her burned and disfigured face totally bandaged. She has plastic surgery, choosing to resemble her former self, and not a movie star like her surgeon suggests. Nelly wants to reunite with her German husband, Johnny (Ronald Zehrfeld). She used to be a singer, he a pianist. She comes back to a ravaged Berlin, where her former neighbors are now desperate to survive and to forget and deny everything.
This movie by Christian Petzold is almost pulpy. Phoenix is reminiscent of Eyes Without A Face, 1940s melodramas, of film noir, even of Cabaret. But at the core of this brilliant film is the very real topic of the German reckoning with Nazism.
After refusing to move to Palestine, Nelly stays in Berlin to continue her search for Johnny. She finally finds him, going by a different name, working as a busboy at the Phoenix nightclub. He does not recognize her. Still, it occurs to him that he could use this woman to pretend that she is his returned wife in order to collect her money from reparations. He nicely offers to give her some of it for the ruse.
We are being asked to suspend our disbelief. How can he not recognize her? How can she agree to such a thing? How can she love him? Nelly fabricates an exculpatory fantasy of his not knowing, much like Germans did. Incomprehensibly, she insists on being with him, despite mounting evidence that he betrayed her and that he is abhorrent. Her answer as to why took my breath away.
The question is: after an inconceivable atrocity such as the Holocaust, how can we not suspend our disbelief? If the Holocaust was possible, this story of burning love is also possible.
Petzold balances the twists of the plot and the moral probing of the story (which is based on a novel) by embracing cinematic genres. Realism is insufficient, it seems, to deal head-on with human atrocity and its consequences. The metaphor of a phoenix not only refers to Nelly, who claws her way back to life through love; but to Germany, and how it rose from the ashes through obfuscation, denial, and silent shame, if not sheer opportunistic profiting. Paradoxically, Petzold’s reliance on genre actually strengthens the film’s j’accuse. Phoenix is both a terrific movie (a stylized fiction, a cultural artifact), and a powerful indictment of German culpability. It also happens to have one of the best endings I’ve ever seen on film.

Ida

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This review contains spoilers.

An emotionally devastating film set in the aftermath of the Holocaust in Poland, this intimate movie directed by Pawel Pawlikowski and co-written with Rebecca Lenkiewicz, is about Ida (Agata Trzebuchowska), a young Catholic novice who, right before she is to take her vows, learns that she is actually a Jew who was left at the doors of a convent after her parents were murdered during the war.

Ida learns the truth from her aunt and sole surviving relative, Wanda (Agata Kulesza), a hard charging judge in the communist regime, who harbors an unspeakable loss. A die-hard atheist and drinker who barrels through life with seismic amounts of anger, she rolls her eyes at Ida’s Catholic devotion, but Ida is as innocent of the world as her aunt is cynical and worldly. Reminded that this girl is her sole remaining relative, Wanda takes her on a road trip to find the little that is left of her roots.
The movie quietly points its finger at a society that behaved, in most cases, execrably (with generous help from the Catholic Church) towards Polish Jews, during and after the war. But although it is shot in beautiful, expressive black and white, in the square format of the movies of the time, things are not so black and white in this story: her entire family was killed, but baby Ida was saved by some perverse dispensing of pity. We wonder how such deeply pious people could have been so callous, so murderous towards their Jewish neighbors. They were goaded by centuries of church-sponsored antisemitism, greed and the opportunities of war. Bitter irony stings as the current occupant of Ida’s family home makes a bargain with her: he will show her where her family is buried as long as she does not claim her house back. She is a nun, he says, he can trust her. Her aunt Wanda went to fight with the Resistance and came back to find that her entire family was wiped out, not by the Nazis, but by the next door neighbors. This is the j’accuse of the film.

By concentrating in the story of one family, long after the war, the film presents its indictment of the collaboration of the Polish citizenry in genocide from a personal and intimate point of view, and this is what makes it emotionally powerful. We do not recoil and distance ourselves from scenes of violence and atrocity, instead, we are vulnerable to Wanda’s and Ida’s tragic discoveries. Ida devastates because it concentrates on the choices people make under extraordinary circumstances. In the aftermath, everybody has to live with what they did: the Poles deal with the past by generally pretending they knew nothing and remember nothing. Wanda becomes a sort of avenger. In the figure of Ida, an unlikely survivor, yet not really a survivor, since all Jewishness has been erased from her, the film asks for acknowledgment of the citizens’ complicity in murder. Meanwhile, the film shows what little remnants there are left of a once vibrant community: old photographs, a forlorn Jewish cemetery in disrepair.

Ida also provides an interesting contrast in characters between the reticent, modest novice a and her world-weary, provocative aunt. In terms of experiences, Ida is almost a blank slate, while Wanda wears decades of rage, fighting and grief in her every gesture. Both actresses are phenomenal, in particular Kulesza. Wanda likes to chain smoke, sleep around and drink, and goads Ida to give life a try. She is merciless in her pursuit of the murderers, but once they get to the family grave in the woods, her anger gives way to grief and she loses her bearings.

As she finds out the truth, Ida must make a choice. After discovering, in the space of a very short time, the existence of truly banal evil, as well as the possibility of living freely as a young woman in the world, she decides to live outside of history. The ending is happy or tragic depending on whether you think that joining a convent at a young age is a good thing or a living death. At least from a Jewish point of view, Ida’s reaffirmation of her Catholicism deepens the scope of the tragedy. There will be no trace left of her family at all. 

We don’t know if Ida decides to recuse herself from the world because she has found it tainted with horror, or because she expects to glow in purity and religious devotion, or to somehow honor the disappearance of her family by disappearing from the world. She’s smart enough to get a taste of what she will be missing after she takes her vows, but it is not enough to convince her that life in the somber world she has briefly experienced is worth it. Perhaps it is as simple as going back to the only womb she knows, which gave her life but also took her real life away from her.

Hannah Arendt

At the beginning of Margarethe Von Trotta’s new film about the German philosopher (opening at Film Forum May 29), one fears many scenes of intellectuals talking. Actors tend to play intellectuals as grandstanding orators. They pontificate while eating pigs in a blanket at a cocktail party; they know no small talk that doesn’t involve Kant. Thankfully, there are only a few such clunky scenes at the outset, and then the movie hits its stride by focusing on Arendt’s coverage of the trial of nazi Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem.
Hannah Arendt was an important German Jewish philosopher, who studied with Heidegger (with whom she had an affair as a student), Karl Jaspers and Edmund Husserl. Before she got into hot water by covering the Eichmann trial, she wrote the very influential books, The Origins of Totalitarianism and The Human Condition. She escaped Nazi Germany, was captured and escaped a French detention camp, and emigrated to the US, where she taught at the New School. The movie focuses on her coverage of the trial for The New Yorker, and the fallout after what came to be known as “the controversy”.
The movie smartly uses real footage of the trial to show us chilling glimpses of Eichmann himself, feigning stupidity and insisting he was just following orders. This is what made Arendt formulate her now famous thesis about the “banality of evil”. According to her, Eichmann was not an extraordinary monster, but a middling bureaucrat who had no real animosity towards Jews and thought he was just doing his job. That is, she bought his crap lock, stock and barrel; but even so, she raised a valid point, which we understand all too well these days. Yet only about 20 years after the Holocaust, with many survivors still smarting, her idea of genocidal bureaucratic mediocrity was not received with open arms. It was not understood at the time what is obvious to us today, that most people who actively participate in mass murder, as Arendt assumed rightly, are not extraordinary, but actually the opposite: ignorant, mediocre, easily swayed idiots. One has just to watch the appalling footage of the most recent barbaric act of Islamic fundamentalists, who hacked to death a soldier in London, to clearly grasp her point. Today, we understand her concept of the banality of evil not only because we have lived it, through 9/11 and all subsequent murderous acts of devotion to warped ideologies, but because we have more historical distance and reams of information about the participation of regular people in the depravity, not only of the Holocaust, but of other modern genocides as well. Alas, this was not the case with Eichmann. He was the architect and executor of the Final Solution, not just a pencil pusher.
The movie depicts how, at the time, many Jews mistook Arendt’s description of Eichmann as a petty bureaucrat as sympathetic to him. She was not. However, her reporting of a part of the trials that dealt with the collaboration of Jewish community leaders in the deportation of Jews to their deaths, fared even worse. Even though the testimony came from the trials themselves, Arendt was ostracized and excoriated, and lost some dear friends, for asserting that if these leaders had not dutifully collaborated (perhaps unknowingly at first) with the nazi deportation machine, there would have been more chaos and less Jews would have perished. All hell broke loose. She was accused of being a self-hating Jew and got threats and hate mail. Being a philosopher, the biggest gulf she was unable or uninterested in bridging was the one between the intellectual purity of her reasoning and the emotional, unfathomable humanity of the events. She was not there to give comfort or empathy, but to look evil in the eye. She made no moral judgements, but tried to understand what makes human beings evil. Even if she made a grave mistake in believing Eichmann’s “just following orders” routine (the standard excuse of every living coward who has been ever accused of crimes against humanity, a phrase she coined), she did give us a truer understanding of the nature of human evil. She is a giant.
Played by Barbara Sukowa with riveting intensity, Arendt reaches a dramatic apex with a fantastic 8-minute speech she gives at the New School, defending her position. Her major philosophical points are clearly and well interspersed in this and other moments in the film.
I wish there would have been more of Arendt’s conflict as a Jew. That German-Jewish duality which allowed her to forgive Heidegger for kissing nazi ass, and that perhaps understood all too well the organizational skills of Germans like Eichmann. She was a proud German, so how did she really feel about the Jewish question? Was she ever able to reconcile her pride in German culture to what these people did to her own?
In the end, for a movie about intellectuals, Hannah Arendt is a surprisingly strong, fascinating experience. It’s a good thing too that Janet McTeer is there to lend her remarkable gifts as Mary McCarthy, who was Arendt’s steadfast friend. Hannah Arendt may be the first movie that has ever made me want to go read a philosopher. It must be doing something right.

Django Unchained

Or, I never expected to like a Tarantino movie so much.

This Must Be The Place

An interesting train wreck of a movie by Paolo Sorrentino, the film stars Sean Penn as Cheyenne, a washed out emo rocker who lives in a sad, grand mansion in Ireland (to avoid taxes) and is bored out of his meager wits, which seem to have been extinguished by a life of drug use. The main problem with the movie is Penn’s performance, which as committed as it is, and not without flashes of humor and slyness, is too exaggerated to be believable. Penn makes Cheyenne a soft spoken mess, a too delicate spirit still wearing makeup and hideous eighties hair long past his expiration date, but he turns out to be wily once he finds a purpose in life. Cheyenne is depressed because his morose songs made a young fan commit suicide. His wife, the fantastic Frances McDormand, (despite her spirited performance, it’s impossible to understand what she sees in him), tells him he needs to find something to do with his life. He decides to go to America to see his father, whom he hasn’t talked to in thirty years. The father turns out to be an orthodox Jew and Holocaust survivor. Cheyenne learns that the Nazi who tortured him is still around, and goes on a quest to find him. His wispy façade conceals a man with a healthy force of will: the pathetic ex-rocker becomes a pretty effective Nazi headhunter. The movie is a moral fable about guilt and consequences, about children and parents, about people holding dark secrets that spread misery around like an invisible force field. What makes it fascinating is the contrast between its haunting sadness and Sorrentino’s trademark crisp, hyperrealistic visual style (Luca Bigazzi is the cinematographer). The movie doesn’t quite work, but you can’t avert your eyes. Cheyenne goes from New York, where he confides in his friend David Byrne, playing himself, to the Southwest, to the Midwest, and I was bracing for the usual European filmmaker oversimplifying of America and its Marlboro country vistas, but Sorrentino is smarter than that. He doesn’t caricature America or its people, he trains his stylish eye on its endless landscapes. The movie looks gorgeous.
Cheyenne’s search leads him to the Nazi’s granddaughter (a great Kerry Condon) and her chubby misfit of a son, and the three develop a tender friendship. This is the best part of the movie, the most quietly moving. The rest is tonally jarring, deeply unbalanced by a central performance that doesn’t quite jell and a strained ending. But the music by David Byrne and Will Oldham is lovely and if you decide to go on the quirky ride, This Must Be The Place has, at moments, a certain amount of grace.

Foreign Policy and The Oscars

Few categories are more infuriating than the Best Foreign Film category in the Oscars. The films are submitted by their countries (a bureaucratic choice), so many times there are ridiculous omissions in the category. Sometimes great movies happen to make it to the list, only to be voted down by either feel-good movies, foreign movies that are Hollywood wannabes, or Holocaust movies.
The Holocaust movie/documentary winner has become like a bad recurring joke. I’ve no doubt that some of them are worthy films, but I think this is a case in which the good intentions of an insular industry end up creating animosity. Most people just roll their eyes every time yet another documentary or foreign film on the subject wins, particularly when the competing subjects are other equally egregious human injustices, whose loss seems guaranteed at the mere inclusion of a Holocaust themed competitor. There is Holocaust fatigue. And worse, the very disturbing fact that among some non-Jews this is seen as some sort of irrational, obnoxious Jewish obsession with the topic. 
This year, there is a true contender in the Foreign Film category that is almost the sure bet to win the statuette. Iran’s official entry, A Separation, is, in my view, the best movie of the year. But it cannot compete in that category, so it has been nominated, not only for foreign film but surprisingly for best original screenplay as well. Truly deserved on both counts.
Its win could be a fait accompli if it weren’t for two movies that may prove tough contenders. Poland’s In Darkness, about, guess what, the Holocaust, and an Israeli movie called Footnote, which won best screenplay at Cannes last year.
Indeed, Footnote boasts a great screenplay, but its execution is deeply flawed. In Darkness is a good, but uneven movie. And it’s about the Holocaust. About the other contenders I know little and I don’t expect the members of the Academy to know much more (a movie from Belgium, and a movie from Canada). The only one that truly made a splash internationally, and with good reason, is A Separation.
The problem is that it is from Iran, a country that seems to be our current foreign policy bogeyman. This may put the voters in a conundrum. Do they want to reward a movie sent by a regime they probably hate? If they are smart, I think they should. The right thing is to award it the prize on its outstanding artistic merit. At the same time, this would also be a very meaningful symbolic statement. It would extend a hand to the people of Iran, who are brilliantly, humanely represented in the movie, amidst the worrisome cacophony of bellicose intentions among certain hawks in the US and Israel. And this could perhaps even elegantly flip the anti-American and anti-Semitic propaganda of Iran. But if instead of giving the award to A Separation, it goes to In Darkness (massive roll of the eyes) or to Footnote, Iran and all the Jew haters can go back to saying that the Jews run everything anyway, etc. If Belgium or Canada win, it’s a cop out and nobody cares.
This is the most important prize of the evening, people. The smart thing to do is to vote for A Separation. It is, after all the much superior film.
On the surface, A Separation does not seem like an overtly political film. But it is a very shrewd film which depicts a society that is deeply divided along class lines (The educated, more secular middle class, and the poor and pious), who, thanks to their particular kind of regime, are incapable of coming to terms with one another. The movie shows how a simple decision by an unhappy wife who wants to leave the country and a husband who cannot, snowballs into a drama that involves almost all segments of Iranian society. It is not a particularly rosy picture of life in Tehran, but it feels true.

I remember my shock when The Secret In Their Eyes, a Hollywoodish Argentinian potboiler took the prize from the magnificent French film A Prophet, in a year where both were competing against Michael Haneke’s The White Ribbon. The winner was a perfectly entertaining movie, but A Prophet and The White Ribbon are masterpieces, too gloomy and realistic for the feel good schmaltz of the Academy.
A Separation is a masterpiece. Vote smart.

An Old Fart Game

Well, now we know why the Oscars are so irrelevant, so bland, so boring, so conventional. Because the Academy is comprised almost exclusively of white alte cackers. 
The LA Times culled the numbers in shocking infographics.
The numbers are appalling:

• 94% white
• 77% male
• 2% black
• Less than 2% Latino
• 14% people under 50
• Median age is 62

The absence of women is appalling, the dearth of Blacks and Latinos is appalling, the dearth of young working talent is appalling. But while the dearth of people of color is somehow less surprising, I find the lack of women across most important categories (writer, director, producer, executive, cinematographer) absolutely dispiriting. How can we expect the Academy to have more minorities if they don’t even have women! It is very disappointing that an industry that makes so much money and has so much cultural influence throughout the world is so disgracefully behind the times.
That is why they vote for aberrations intended to make it look like the Academy is progressive, making matters even worse, because movies like Slumdog Millionaire and The Help are condescending heaps of false piety.
Bizarrely, not everybody who is nominated is automatically invited to become a member, which would make the most sense to me, unless the Academy aims to belong in the fossil wing of the Museum of Natural History. 
To make matters worse, some important members have the nerve to disdain these findings. From a comment on Deadline Hollywood Daily:

From the article…”I don’t see any reason why the academy should represent the entire American population. That’s what the People’s Choice Awards are for,” said Pierson, who still serves on the board of governors. “We represent the professional filmmakers, and if that doesn’t reflect the general population, so be it.”
I completely agree. This is a group representing an industry. Who cares if it’s diverse?

Indeed, the Academy doesn’t have to mirror US demographics to a T, but what arrogance. This window into the make-up of the Academy simply reflects the reality of Hollywood as a whole. I find it very unfair and very sad, and quite alarming that instead of being jolted by it, they are defensive. This is the typical response of members of a boys’ club.
Now, the Academy is an invitation only club and they can have the rules they want. Or maybe not. But if they want to be relevant, and they want more ratings, and they actually want the Oscars to stand for something meaningful, it would behoove them to diversify. Bringing in James Franco and Anne Hathaway is bad cosmetic surgery, and obviously didn’t work. Have a younger, newer, more diverse membership with more adventurous tastes and a wider frame of reference. This may give comedies and independent films a better chance, which may bring a wider audience. In the end, even though the Oscars have always been nothing but a brazen PR stunt, it is in the interest of Hollywood to make people feel passion for movies. This is not going to happen if they keep creaking while the rest of the world zips ahead.

I’m already disenchanted with many of the nominees, the glaring omissions and the sinking feeling it’s going to be particularly gnarly his year. Billy Crystal? He’s funny, but we might as well hoof it to a crumbling hotel in the Catskills and call it a day.
I am going to shoot my TV if A Separation doesn’t win best foreign picture, and the politics here are complicated, in a field that has both a Holocaust movie and an Israeli movie, neither of which shines a candle to the Iranian film. (I’m writing a separate post on this complex issue).
If The Help wins, I might have to shoot innocent bystanders.

In Darkness

It took me a couple of days to be able to write about this movie by Agnieszka Holland, which, as many Holocaust movies tend to be, is nominated for a foreign picture Oscar. I still think A Separation is the undisputed winner, but you know how it is with Holocaust movies and Oscar voters. And this one is not bad. At least, it goes through great lengths to be honest: Poles are portrayed as the Church-encouraged Antisemites they mostly were, and Jews are not the saintly, passive victims they tend to be. Some are selfish and hysterical, others are duplicitous, others are civilized, but in these circumstances they all are reduced to bare bones human nature. Nazis are portrayed as what they were, sadistic monsters, abetted by criminal propaganda and safety in numbers.
This harrowing movie is based on the real story of a group of Polish Jews who were hidden in the sewers of Lvov by Leopold Socha, a Polish thief who knew the sewers like the back of his hand. At first he does it for the money only. One of the Jews is wealthy and gives him 500 zlotys a day to keep them safe in the sewers and bring them food. But Socha, the wonderful Robert Wieckiewicz, finds he has in him an unexplained human impulse to help these people, namely compassion or sheer human decency, even as his Ukrainian friend is offering, through the auspices of the Nazis, the same amount of money to rat out hiding Jews. He could have ratted the Jews out and be a hero to the Nazis, saving himself a whole lot of trouble. But he didn’t and he reluctantly saved the lives of these Jews, including two children, one of whom wrote a memoir.
As she seems to remember it, or as Holland would have it, there was a lot of extramarital sex going on in the ghetto and the sewers. If you are suffering from scurvy and are living in a rat and shit infested sewer, I wonder how much libido you have. I can see sex as a representation of the will to live, but once would have made the point more powerfully.
I think Holland wanted to make a Holocaust movie that showed more of the personal impact, and in this she succeeds. The suffering is horrible and individualized: instead of your garden variety anonymous Jews being led to slaughter, we get individual characters having a really hard time because of who they are, and not only because they are starving. Mr. Socha also has to deal with risk and suspicion, and he also repeats tired chestnuts about Jews being greedy, etc. It’s not black and white.
Holland is a very lucid, competent director, who gets great performances from all her actors, especially the two children, and the movie is extremely well made, with excellent cinematography by Jolanta Dylewska, and particularly strong editing. It’s solid but too long. Just as it has some powerful scenes, as when the Jews emerge from the darkness in the middle of a sunny day, almost blinded, to the surprise of their Polish countrymen, here and there it goes into cheesy territory, like a ridiculous scene of a naked woman in the sewer bathing herself with rain water. After 14 months in there she has no reason to look like a pinup.
In his review of this film, A.O. Scott, who has written about the Holocaust “genre” before, complains that this is a feel good movie. Through three fourths of the film, in my view, it is definitely not. It is hard to sit through. It’s tough minded, complicated and realistic. To the point that I wonder what compels audiences to voluntarily seek out the punishment of Holocaust movies, if not morbid curiosity, or a need for excruciating catharsis. At the end, after all Holland puts the audience through, you  think there better be a happy ending, and there is one. The Jews were saved.
But in the postscript, where we learn the facts of the story through titles, life gets to break our heart. Socha finds a premature death and the titles explain that people in his town thought that this was God’s punishment for saving the Jews. Plus ça change.
Socha and his wife are among the 6000 Polish citizens recognized as Righteous Among The Nations by Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial in Israel.