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At the
Movies
In
a maelstrom
By JOSEPH CUNNEEN
Costa-Gavras, a French filmmaker who
made his reputation by infusing political content with high excitement
(“Z,” “State of Siege”), uses his new movie, Amen,
to explore the failure of Pope Pius XII to protest Hitler’s extermination
of the Jews during World War II. An adaptation of Rolf Hochhuth’s play,
“The Deputy,” which caused an international uproar when it appeared
in 1963, “Amen” raises lots of still important questions, but
somewhat softens the pope’s failure by seeing it as part of a wider
indifference to the Holocaust by those who knew what was going on. The American
ambassador, for example, is shown as considering any effort to rescue the Jews
a distraction from the prosecution of the war. What emerges is a film worth
seeing, yet with surprisingly little dramatic bite.
The central character of “Amen” is not Pius XII, who is
only a dim background figure in the scenes in which he appears, but Kurt
Gerstein (Ulrich Tukur), an expert on the sterilization of water. A historical
person, Gerstein was recruited by a sinister SS official, the Doctor (Ulrich
Mühe) to use his chemical expertise in carrying out “the final
solution.”
The movie’s most powerful moment shows the reaction on
Gerstein’s face after he is brought to a concentration camp and looks
through a peephole at the Jews being gassed inside.
Gerstein is presented as a serious Protestant able to do nothing
but cooperate with the program while hoping to slow down the pace of the
killing and try to inform the outside world of what is going on. When he
approaches his pastor, he is advised to be quiet; when he tries to get the
Catholic bishop to take his information to the Vatican, he is rudely dismissed;
someone wearing an SS uniform has little credibility. Only one person takes him
seriously, a composite figure, Riccardo Fontana (Mathieu Kassovitz), a Jesuit
priest assigned to the papal nuncio in Berlin.
Although the Fontana’s father works in the Vatican, Fontana
is unable to crack the self-protective atmosphere shared by the pope’s
advisers who remind the priest that Hitler, for all his faults, is a bulwark
against communism. He brings Gerstein to Rome, hoping that the latter’s
extensive evidence on the death camps will lead to action, but without success.
Finally, Fontana’s father assures him that Pius XII will include a
condemnation of the mass killings in his upcoming Christmas message, but this
only leads to further disillusionment as he and Gerstein listen anxiously to
their radio and hear the pope solemnly proclaim a series of empty
platitudes.
Despite the urgency of its subject, the dialogue of
“Amen” has little emotional power; its most suggestive images are the
recurring shots of freight trains rolling through the German countryside.
Making “Amen” as an English-language film may have been a shrewd
commercial decision, but since most of the actors are not at home with the
language, their words lack clarity and immediacy. More seriously, the agonizing
contradictions in Gerstein’s position are never dramatized, and
Fontana’s gestures, even when he pins a yellow star on his habit at the
end, seem to convey weakness rather than heroism. Although Costa-Gavras should
be commended for avoiding a simplistic broadside against the pope, showing that
the Vatican was also sheltering Jews inside its walls, the necessary scene in
the conflict he is dramatizing is missing -- the one in which Pius XII wrestles
with his moral responsibilities.
Roman Polanski’s The
Pianist, which won the Palme d’Or at Cannes last spring, packs a
stronger emotional charge, perhaps because it concentrates on individuals
caught in the Nazi maelstrom. The movie is based on the memoir of the pianist
Wladyslav Szpilman, whose tightly knit, upper-middle class Jewish family was
sent to their deaths in 1942, while he himself survived, half-mad with hunger
and solitude, in an abandoned Warsaw apartment. “The Pianist” is a
demanding movie, and the second half could usefully have been cut by 20
minutes, but it conveys the horrors of Nazi power exercised against helpless
Jews more powerfully than “Schindler’s List.”
Polanski, who himself escaped the Kraków ghetto as a child
during World War II, presents a succession of relentlessly precise images of
the day-by-day process in the destruction of Jewish life in Warsaw. The picture
opens in 1939 as German artillery shells hit the local radio station, forcing
Wladyslav, who is playing Chopin with total absorption, off the air. Shocked by
the increasing violence around them as the walls of the ghetto are erected, the
Szpilmans retain their dignity at each stage, the father dividing an overpriced
caramel evenly between them as they are about to be taken to a concentration
camp. At the last moment, a Jewish policeman working for the SS throws the
pianist to the ground, and tells him to disappear.
Adrien Brody, who as Wladyslav conveys the maximum of emotion with
a minimum of dialogue, does not even have time to register surprise; he
scurries away like a hunted animal through the abandoned ghetto streets.
The director avoids both sensationalism and sentimentality; some
will fault the movie for not making the pianist heroic or revealing his inner
thoughts. We understand his fear and hunger easily enough, for the rest Brody
has to rely on his deep, sad eyes, and exhaustion on his handsome, aristocratic
face. The director’s own experience guides the choice of details that
convey the shock, resignation, and gradual rebellion within the ghetto, and he
follows Szpilman’s account of how members of the Resistance took him from
one hiding place to another, with one of his would-be rescuers turning out to
be a simple opportunist.
The sadism of Nazi guards, though inevitably repetitive, should
remind audiences of how intoxicating is the existence of unchallenged physical
power. The real-life Wladyslaw Szpilman lived to be 88. In the film, we are
immensely relieved by his survival, but Polanski goes out of his way to show
that it was simply an ironic fluke. Szpilman’s extreme loneliness leaves
him almost a cipher; when, just before the Germans are forced to abandon
Warsaw, he gets a chance to play on a real piano, it is a desperate assertion
of long-repressed inner being. At the end, after liberation, Szpilman is back
at the radio station playing the same Chopin nocturne we heard at the
beginning. Polanski deliberately does not give him any comment, but we share a
sense of muter emotional triumph despite his tragic losses.
Chaos is a fast-paced French
comedy that maintains suspense in equal measure, and is more entertaining than
“Thelma and Louise” in its criticism of male superiority.
Writer-director Coline Serreau opens with a bourgeois couple hurrying to dinner
when their car is stopped by a young hooker who is frantically running away
from pursuing thugs. Husband Paul (Vincent Lindon) locks the car doors, leaving
the woman to be viciously beaten by her pursuers. Before he drives off,
however, he is careful to wipe the blood off the windshield of his Peugeot.
Paul’s wife Hélène (Catherine Frot) seeks out
the victim, Malika (Rachida Brakni), in the intensive care ward of a nearby
hospital. Aghast at finding her in a coma, Hélène watches
patiently over the young woman, abandoning her husband and her equally
narcissistic teenage son. At one point in Malika’s slow process of
recovery, her guardian slams a board over the head of one of the thugs who
comes to the hospital to threaten their victim.
The story veers to melodrama when Malika tells a lurid story of
how her father sold her to an older Algerian man, and her attempt to escape
left her the victim of pimps. Unfortunately, its plea for freedom for Muslim
women has no time for the depiction of the typical life of North African men in
France, and Malika’s liberation is achieved by the use of her
“flame-thrower” gaze to entrap an elderly Swiss millionaire. Brakni
won a César, France’s equivalent of an Oscar, for her captivating
performance as Malika, but there is no denying that Malika’s
“feminist” revenge is achieved by sex.
“Chaos” nevertheless succeeds because it establishes the
nature of the Paul-Hélène marriage from the start, with both
Lindon and Frot showing a genuine talent for comedy. Paul’s inability to
cope with the house in Hélène’s absence is hilarious, and
her elaborate indifference to his fury only adds to the fun.
Joseph Cunneen, NCR’s regular movie reviewer, can
be contacted through e-mail at Scunn24219@aol.com
National Catholic Reporter, February 14,
2003
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