Paradise

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Directed by Andrei Konchalovsky, Silver Lion for Best Director at the Venice Film Festival

Screens Wednesday, May 10, 6:30 pm, at the Museum of Fine Arts, followed by Q&A with Professor Antony Polonsky. Presented by the National Center for Jewish Film’s 20th Annual Film Festival, May 4–21, 2017

 

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Andrei Konchalovsky’s Paradise isn’t new—we’ve seen the horrors of Nazi concentration camps in dozens of films before, including the dichotomy of lifestyles between the SS officers and those in the barracks. But actually, Paradise is new and leaves audiences silent in their seats afterward with mental images and thoughts to process. It’s a work of art about something terrible—not just the Holocaust, but us, humanity, and our susceptibility to evil.

The film’s shot in black and white, and Konchalovsky has said why: “The Holocaust and concentration camps in color is obscene. It’s not true. It’s not what we know.” He means that what we know of the camps’ horrors has come to us in black-and-white photographs. In Paradise, the interior barracks’ scenes are shot close up and make the cramped, filthy, hellish environment—and victims imprisoned therein—physically tangible.

The film’s construction uses intermittent, documentary-style interviews of the three principal characters, adding an extra creative element to the work. The characters are Helmut (Christian Clauss), a young SS officer from the nobility; Olga (Julia Vysotskaya), a sinewy Russian aristocrat and Vogue editor; and Jules (Philippe Duquesne), a high-ranking Paris police officer cooperating with the Nazis to round up Jews. These three, dressed in plain gray against an empty background—nowhere space—talk openly about what happened to them during the war. Live scenes from the war itself fill in the details of these narratives. We come to see these interviews more as depositions before an unseen god; the individuals, stripped of earthly accoutrements, are James Joyce’s “shades.” They are dead now and seated in purgatory, their final destination yet to be judged.

Olga and Helmut are the film’s central characters. She’s in the camp for having hidden two Jewish boys. Helmut has come to the camp to investigate corruption, following his success in this role at another camp, where he had the SS leader executed for stealing. Helmut is an upright believer in Hitler’s rhetoric of a perfect Germany, a paradise, and he lives impeccably by the rules—until he discovers Olga in the camp’s supply house and recognizes her as the stunning woman he fell passionately in love with one summer at a luxurious resort. Silent flashbacks to that palatial setting—the elegant men and women in period white—resemble the film art of Renais’s Last Year in Marienbad. Helmut’s flashbacks to idle life on the hotel's grand terrace are as romanticized as his vision of Germany’s perfect future. His naïveté slowly becomes the main focus of the drama and is what leaves the audience pondering, for the childlike joy and zeal in Helmut’s viewpoint leads to delusion, corruption, and self-destruction, or internal rot. The film is a study in evil through a young, attractive man with likeable qualities as he narrates his story but never understands himself as we do. What are we to make of this material? “There are no answers,” the director tells us in a Venice Festival interview, “only questions. We try to answer and always fail.”

Through Helmut’s warm, personable confession about his life, we are shown how an individual latched onto Nazism as the holy grail for a better world. Clauss’s acting is superb, sympathetic, believable. Helmut tells us he comes from a long line of proud nobility and military service to the homeland. But in the early 1930s, embarking on his adult life, he and other “good Germans” felt despair because their world was being destroyed by “Jews and Communists  triumphing.” Other comments he makes show us his blindly justified anti-Semitism.

Then, a glimmer of hope came along for him and others—a magnetic speaker, a new political force instilling hope for restoration of the German ideal. Helmut’s face lights up with awe as he tells us, “You had to be there to feel it. His speeches were more than just words. They touched our souls. A great idea had found a great man, and he knew how to express it. Under his leadership, we would not only revive Germany, we would build an entire new world, a paradise for our people, a German paradise on earth.”

Like any evil movement that tries to annihilate another group of human beings, Nazism’s pull can be understood through Helmut’s subjective socio-political needs—to us his weakness, but to him his correct moral code. He’s an easy target, just as ISIS, Boko Haram, and other terrorist groups today find their disenfranchised, disillusioned, and na

-->ïve recruits. Helmut’s sympathetic side in the purgatorial interview contrasts sharply to his SS role in the film’s real life—he’s ice cold, ruthless, and has zero regard for Jews. This contrast in his character—nice guy/horrible guy—is what keeps the audience thinking long after the movie has ended, and for which the director has already told us, “There are no answers.”

Helmut as a shade: proud, inherently anti-Semitic, and destroyed by his belief in himself as "doing good."

Fanny's Journey

Directed by Lola Doillon

Boston premiere, screens May 11, 6:30 pm and May 21, 2:30 pm, at the Museum of Fine Arts. Presented by the National Center for Jewish Film’s 20th Annual Film Festival, May 4–21, 2017.

Many memoirs have been written by children who survived the Holocaust, in flight on their own with terrifying murderers on their heels. Fanny’s Journey, based on one of those memoirs, by octogenarian Fanny Ben-Ami, illuminates the unifying phenomenon that exists in all these stories, and that is a child’s innate survivor abilities. True, not all humans have this instinct to the same degree, many collapse in surrender, but resilience and wily survivor skills saved many children fleeing a monolithic enemy with pointed guns. It mind-blows safe and comfortable audiences that even three and four year olds understand the life-and-death importance of utter silence—the silence of hunted animals in the bushes as the predator goes sniffing by. It’s horrible to witness unprotected children dealing with war and the enemy—they’re vulnerable scavengers propelled onward by hunger and terror. The nine children’s flight toward Switzerland in Fanny’s Journey has relevance today with the Syrian and other civil wars ongoing.

The subject of adults hunting down innocent children in order to kill them takes a new tack in Doillon’s film. She intentionally eschews scenes of violence: “I wanted to make a movie on World War II that children of any age could watch with their family or teachers. I hope it opens a dialogue,” she says. Some critics will complain about this approach, because it overly softens some of the movie’s scenes, further sweetened by sentimental music. In particular, the recurring “play motif” might feel heavy-handed; the movie begins with boarding-school children in rural France playing ball on a grassy lawn, their laughter and fresh-air delight keenly felt. They’re called home by a teacher who hands out the mail, one of the letters for Fanny and her two younger sisters—Jewish children who have been placed at the tucked-away school for safekeeping in Nazi-occupied France. Fanny’s mother writes of the camp where their father has been interred—he’s alive but no one knows his fate. Later, when the children endure the terrors of their flight to Switzerland, periodic moments of the same playful abandon and laughter occur. On the point of exhaustion and dehydration, the children find a stream and drink deeply. Afterward they splash each other and then abandon themselves to water play. These periodic intrusions to the otherwise harrowing drama are actually purposeful on the director’s part: They remind us that only children have the ability to lose themselves in play and laughter, and this precious innocence is the adult world’s responsibility to safeguard. Additionally, the Holocaust should be taught in schools to cultivate humanity from an early age, and making this unimaginably cruel subject acceptable for young audiences through a film for all ages benefits global societies. The nine children in the story have heartwarming appeal that draws us immediately and intimately into their journey. Fanny, age thirteen, leads her brood through every travail, so that for younger audiences the escape is a kind of adventure with a heroine they can identify with.

The historical details surrounding the children’s supervised moves to safe havens, followed by their unaccompanied flight, are excellent. The story’s characters are well-drawn, in particular, Madame Forman, who works for an organization saving Jewish children. Her location is on the Italian border, so that when Mussolini falls, she scrambles to move the children to Switzerland, as the Germans will be pouring into her town at any moment. Her mentorship of Fanny helps the youngster lead the children onward when Madame Forman’s original plan goes awry. That’s when the kids’ “adventure” begins.

Throughout the escape, the kids are dealing with their loss of parents in a realistic way. When standoffish Viktor, who is Fanny’s age, weeps quietly one night that he wants his mother, Fanny holds his hand and weeps with him for their shared losses. She awakes the next morning to find that they’ve fallen asleep curled against one another—as if the parents of their younger charges. We see how the kids can flare-up and fight but a few minutes later be comrades again, their emotional world fluid the way it is with children in real life.

The film’s camera work by Pierre Cottereau also deserves praise; there’s a timing and emotional depth to it, besides the exceptional angle and shot work. Tension achieved by the camera helps advance the plot, along with a strong musical score, some of it “innocent” singing by children.

Principal cast: Léonie Souchaud as Fanny, Cécile de France as Mme. Forman, and Ryan Brodie as Victor