As
cover stories go, the official Communist Party line on the fate of Swedish
diplomat-humanitarian Raoul Wallenberg was pretty bad. The official story is
Wallenberg was accidentally arrested and passed away while languishing in
Lubyanka Prison. That doesn’t exactly put you in the mood to sing “The
Internationale,” does it? Yet, for years, Wallenberg’s family and admirers
suspected his true fate was certainly more mysterious and possibly even worse.
Alexander Rodnyanskiy set out to investigate the Wallenberg case as far as 1990
Glasnost policies would allow, but it turned out that wouldn’t be so very far
after all judging from the resulting documentary, The Mission of Raoul Wallenberg¸ which screens again as a restored revival
selection, twenty-five years after its original New York Jewish Film Festival
premiere.
It
was not merely false hope. For years, eyewitness accounts of prisoners claiming
to have seen Wallenberg in various work camps and prisons trickled out of the
Soviet Union. It wasn’t just the Wallenberg family asking questions. The tens
of thousands of Jewish Hungarians saved by Wallenberg, including future U.S.
Congressman Tom Lantos, also wanted answers. In 1990, Wallenberg’s sister
traveled to the USSR, assuming Glasnost would open all the vaults and archives
to her. Alas, she was over-optimistic.
Rodnyanskiy’s
documentary definitely investigates the Wallenberg disappearance, chasing down
false leads and plausible but uncorroborated witness statements. However, it is
also very clearly testing the limits of the supposedly new order, finding them
not so different from the old regime. We see plenty of stone-walling,
dissembling, and crude bureaucratic runaround. Even though Rodnyanskiy is the
first to admit it does not make much sense for the Soviets to keep such an
explosively embarrassing prisoner locked away somewhere for decades. Yet, all
the evasiveness Rodnyanskiy captures just vindicates and further stokes our
suspicions.
Mission is an amazing work
of documentary filmmaking that renders a severe judgement against the Soviet
Union’s past and present. Its future would also turn out to be just as
disappointing. However, the Ukrainian Rodnyanskiy has evolved into one of
Russia’s finest film producers, whose credits include Andrey Zvyagintsev’s Leviathan. This is a frustrating film,
but due to no fault of Rodnyanskiy. Sadly, it is just as timely now as it was
then. Very highly recommended, the freshly restored, historically significant The Mission of Raoul Wallenberg screens
this coming Monday (1/15) and Wednesday (1/17), at the Walter Reade, as part of
the 2018 NYJFF.
