Unthinkable art

>> Divided We Fall is well-made but rings false

by MARK SLUTSKY

Czech director Jan Hrebejk's Divided We Fall is a film about the Holocaust, though all of its characters save one exist on the periphery of its horror. Yet all are unquestionably affected by it, and the tortuous twisting of morality caused by the unthinkable is the film's real subject.

It's not easy to direct a film, or indeed create any art, about the Holocaust. Spielberg went the award-winning route, and applied his black-and-white Indiana Jones morality to a subject far more complex than he could perhaps glean. Hrebejk deals with what art can possibly never wholly deal with by focussing on the grotesque absurdity of human existence under totalitarian rule. He's partly successful, but the film ultimately falters.

In Divided We Fall, Boleslav Polivka and Anna Siskova play married residents of a small Czechoslovakian town under occupation during the last few years of the war. One night Polivka encounters an escapee from a concentration camp (Csongor Kassai). Polivka and Siskova take Kassai in, hiding him in their pantry. To avert suspicion, Polivka accepts a job offer from a minor Nazi official (Jaroslav Dusek) with his eyes on Polivka's wife. Thus begins the film's blackly ironic twists; to save a Jew, they must align themselves with the enemy.

To his credit, Hrebejk sets up the situation very well, and his actors all strike the right notes. Particularly effective is Kassai, who resembles John Turturro with an overbite, the living manifestation of the horrors the movie never shows. There's a couple of questionable choices--one could do without the blurry hand-held camera style that accompanies any sequence meant to be intense--but Hrebejk is largely a capable director.

The main problem is the film's ultimately life-affirming conclusion. It's affecting, but the truth is--and this was pointed out nicely by Maus author Art Spiegelman when he spoke in town some years ago--that the use of the Holocaust towards any life-affirming message is at best ignorant and at worst a lie. Though the temptation is certainly understandable to derive some hope from such devastation, it's really the wrong place to look. How to create art that deals with the Holocaust is a problem half-a-century old, and Hrebejk hasn't quite solved it here.

Divided We Fall opens Friday, Dec. 7 at Cinéma du Parc