Elie Chouraqui’s The Origin of Violence, shown in 2016 Jewish Festivals around the country, and currently in Boston (bjff.org), rivets viewers, and the question is (always is): Why?
First and foremost: story. But
could this World War II Holocaust story set in today’s France have been so
compelling without the face of the millennial protagonist Nathan Fabre (Stanley
Weber)? As Nathan unravels the secrets of his wealthy paternal ancestry, one
clue emerging after another, his ruggedly handsome face registers shock, pain, anger,
grief, bafflement, horror, and despair. We see these emotions battling across
his face, and especially in his expressive, all-absorbing eyes, as he deals
with the relatives he has always loved and trusted, and as he simultaneously grapples
with his own identity, as an entirely different heritage unfolds for him.
Learning the family’s secrets, only because of a incident while visiting
Buchenwald, devastates his entire life, with deeper pain the deeper he digs.
The “Origin of Violence” title has
to do with Nathan’s lifelong struggle with inexplicable violence that erupts from
him at the slightest provocation from menacing strangers on the streets. He tells
us as the movie opens (and with eerie, sinister music in the background) that he’s
always lived in fear and as a child had nightmares of dead bodies surrounding
him. His way of counteracting this fear was to fight, lash out to defend
himself and not be afraid. He also tells his new German girlfriend Gabi that
his old childhood fear is why he still sleeps with the light on. (Later this villainous
background music is understood to reflect Nazism.)
The story is beautifully mapped,
with subtlety, intricacy, and dimension. Its craftsmanship is so fine that
character development and focus have complete authority. Besides the film’s basic
structure of a quest—Nathan’s unearthing of his ancestry—characters from the 1940s
dot his route, each one divulging a fresh clue; these characters create and propel
the plot. They are so well drawn and their contributions so reeling that
emotions in the theater are tangible.
However, a weak link in the
mesmerizing Fabre clan is Nathan’s dad, Papa,
Adrien Fabre (Richard Berry). Somehow Adrien’s sixty-five-year-old appearance can’t
be reconciled to what we are shown was his younger look—“the spitting image of
his own dad”—David Wagner, who is the World War II focal point of Nathan’s
quest. David is tall with a cavernous face like Nathan’s, but Adrien is of
medium height with not one angular bone in his face. We cannot find a trace of
the “spitting image” and it’s a distraction.
Adrien consistently resists his son
Nathan’s probing to uncover the family secrets. For some viewers, the father-son
scene that follows the final, shockwaving revelation might be unsettling, for how
can Adrien just laugh like that, with a mixture of sheepishness and guilt or
nonguilt for his past actions? Why doesn’t he finally talk to his son about
what happened? Yet, Adrien’s response is right, his silly, shrugging-off laugh,
his inability to articulate events. This has been his character throughout the
story—to spurn discussion of the past, forget the past in order to live. But actually
in this scene, he has changed; he has allowed, even embraced, Nathan’s knowing
the truth, even if he himself can’t talk about it. His silly laugh is free,
free from its life-long chains of keeping the secrets. And Nathan has also
changed: he silently accepts his father’s silence—their eyes communicate this
exchange.
We have learned in this movie from several
characters that each person has to go on living his or her own way despite traumatic
family secrets. Adrien’s chosen way is to live with the secrets (keep silent),
and though his way has gravely harmed his son Nathan’s psyche, the film ends
with redemption, conciliation, and above all, the lasting bonds of family love.
This idea that family love can be so strong—through blood ties or no ties—that
even the worst events imaginable, the worst human acts, can be forgiven when
love of a family member is involved—stirs catharsis.
The craftsmanship underpinning
Nathan’s quest happens seamlessly, and thus remarkably. It’s handled by Nathan
receiving phone calls that lead to car drives through European countryside or
along city highways. The locations set to music are visually stimulating the
way cinema should be—the Fabre family’s Normandy manor—seat of the family—contrasting
to the family’s palatial Paris residence of 1940 with its view of the Eiffel
Tower just outside the parlor window. Opulence juxtaposed to sublime countryside,
views of trees, meadows, and ponds in faded autumnal colors. The manor of Nathan’s
era has fallen to decay, the mansion’s front façade crumbling and the once
luxurious gardens with romanesque pool now abandoned to nature.
Nathan makes a few discoveries on
the computer, before his phone rings or something else sparks a cut to his
profile behind the wheel, driving to Weimar (and Gabi), to Buchenwald, to
Geneva, to Normandy. While he drives toward his next clue, he ruminates, wrestles
with his puzzle, his troubled face always our closest communicator. In this
respect—driving—the film requires some suspension of disbelief as the distances
are great, except for Normandy. Paris to Weimar is 7.5 hours; to Buchenwald 8
hours; and to Geneva 4 hours. Nathan has to fit all this long-distance driving
and meeting of his clue-givers into a full-time, high-school teaching job. But
we allow for that, because the tip-offs, followed by driving toward new
information, create the quest-momentum that keeps us riveted in anticipation.
And the surprises keep coming, each
one divulged by a character Nathan meets, from David Wagner’s younger brother Charles,
to David’s closest friend at Buchenwald, Serge Kolb, to Grandfather Marcel Fabre
and his sister Aunt Clémentine. We may think we are unraveling the story of
David, and Nathan’s true heritage, with each unveiling of a clue, but in the
end, when we think the story’s over, one last blow arrives, allowing for the
film’s overwhelming take-away of redemption, in the form of bittersweet familial
love—probably what all family love is, but in the case of the Fabre family, to
a much intenser degree.
Another aspect of craftsmanship
that audiences so caught up in the plot might not notice is the soundtrack. It
varies expectedly when suspenseful moments occur, or violence, but when dealing
with the Fabre past, a liet-motif plays of light-hearted classical music, the
music of prewar Europe’s urbane café life settings and atmosphere. When David
meets his fate at Buchenwald that same music plays like a reminder of his carefree
happy days in Paris. That’s another take-away, for him and for us—how we hold
onto something cherished in the face of death, to stave of fear.
Besides the questionable verisimilitude
in how long Nathan’s drives take, Adrien’s possible miscasting, and the
romantic scene where Nathan heroically swims across a wintry pond to reunite
with his estranged lover Gabi, one other misstep happens, and this is the lack
of information on Charles Wagner’s survival of the Holocaust. He is David’s
younger brother and we meet him in his upper-class Parisian home, where Nathan first
learns family secrets. We view flashbacks of the Wagners’ prewar life as
tailors. Charles tells David: “I’m going to become a doctor and live well.” We
see he has achieved that level of comfort. But why in 1940 was only David taken
to Buchenwald? What happened to the rest of the family? How did Charles
survive?
Related to Charles’s later-life
affluence, is the outcome for other Jewish survivors in this story—they have
succeeded, they live well. A point may be intentional here: “Hitler and the
Nazis did not achieve their objective with me, with my life. I not only
survived but I’ve succeeded.” Strength and determination stronger than hate and
inhumanity.
One technical mistake occurs in the
subtitles and it’s critical. Nathan’s book on his family’s secrets (also the
title of the movie) comes out and his father Adrien turns to the dedication
page and gives a quick smile of approval. The page says in French: to my
grandfathers [plural], and my father. But the subtitles say: To my grandfather
[singular]. Quite a bad mistake, as the entire circle of the movie has to do
with the plural version of grandfather, and which articulation so pleases
Adrian to see in print, as he himself has never been able to speak of that past.
His son did it for him.
The story’s enduring family love—bittersweet
as it is—descends from the patriarch Marcel Fabre, who loves his wife Virginie
so much that latent humanity, true goodness, opens up in him and ever after
influences his care of the family. A key moment in the film may be lost on
English-speaking audiences as the subtitles move fast, and that is when Virginie
shows the first signs of her oncoming insanity. She addresses her husband
Marcel as David, her lover, and speaks to Marcel about their future life
together as if he is David—and everyone knows David is now lost to Buchenwald.
But Marcel, with a heart of gold, plays along with her vision. Loyalty and love
suffuse the troubled relationships in this movie.
And that’s what makes it so
powerful, the family relationships—fathers to sons, children to older
relatives—and also the betrayals, but not intentional betrayals, more
individual choices to hide the truth because hiding is thought to protect from
psychic pain, when in fact, it causes acute emotional impact once discovered.
The movie’s millennial message is: Truth is better than hiding, for hiding can
never hide, as Nathan’s childhood nightmares proved—he picked up his elders’
vibes. Humans transmit information in more ways than words.
Beyond the Fabres’ family story that grabs us, involves us, is
the bittersweet redemption we all experience in family life, to whatever degree,
and despite our foibles and flaws. The movie leaves us with the sure knowledge
that children, born innocent, naturally bear the burden and ravages of their predecessors.
The long chains of family maps and secrets seem to live in our DNA.
Now playing at the Boston Jewish Film Festival and other festivals around the country.
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