Love Gets a Room, Based on the Jerzy Jurandot Play

Their audience could use a good laugh, but they are forbidden to clap. In 1942, the Femina Theatre in the Warsaw Ghetto did indeed open a door-slamming musical farce written by Jerzy Jurandot. On the surface, it would seem to have little relevance to lives of its audience and cast. However, as the characters on-stage shift partners, the participants in a backstage love triangle  wrestle with some life-and-death questions, as well as whom they plan to face them with in Rodrigo Cortes’s Love Gets a Room, which releases today in theaters and on-demand.

Stefcia is a survivor, as we see from the way she navigates the ghetto in the opening sequence, helping others to survive grim encounters with their German captors, on her way to the theaters. The play is Jerzy Jurandot’s Love Gets a Room, which would explain the film’s seemingly inapt title. Rather awkwardly, Stefcia stars as the newlywed wife of her torch-carrying ex-lover Patrik, while co-starring with her current lover Edmund, who plays the husband of her friend Ada.

In the play-within-the-play, both couples are assigned the same apartment by the Ghetto’s Jewish Council, so they decide to make the best of it and live together. Of course, during the course of the stage play, the four newlyweds inevitably start to fall in love with their opposite’s mates. Behind the scenes, Patrik reveals he has bribed a National Socialist officer to allow him to escape. He wants Stefcia to come with him, even though he knows she no longer loves him. Somewhat to her annoyance, Edmund wants her to agree, because it is clear by this point what will happen to those who remain in the Ghetto.

Apparently, most of the film unfolds in real-time during the performance of Jurandot’s play, which was reconstructed for Cortes’s film. The text and lyrics all survived, but new era-appropriate music was composed by Victor Reyes. However, their performance is not entirely faithful. As the intrigue grows backstage, cues are missed, requiring some rather raggedy improvisation.

Yet, that is all part of the intelligence of Cortes’ screenplay and his success realizing it on-screen. Cortes has been off-the-radar since the disappointment of Red Lights, but Love Gets a Room represents a significant creative comeback. The parallels between on-stage and backstage are cleverly executed and the long tracking shots give the film a sense of dramatic tension akin to live stage performance.

Who Will Write Our History?

It was history, scholarship, and paperwork at its most heroic and subversive. Under the leadership of Emanuel Ringelblum the Oyneg Shabbos circle of academics and journalists documented life and death in the Warsaw Ghetto, collecting eye-witness accounts and ephemerals that the National Socialists most definitely did not want preserved. The efforts of Ringelblum and his colleagues are documented and partially dramatized in Roberta Grossman’s Who Will Write Our History? (trailer here), which opens this Friday at the Quad.

Most of the film is told through the words of the Oyneg Shabbos group (so-called because they often met on Sundays), particularly Rachel Auerbach, one of the few survivors. In large measure, the film also draws from visuals preserved within their hidden archives. In doing so, Grossman breaks from and explicitly criticizes previous docs that have relied on the propaganda images produced by the National Socialists themselves, such as the film Warsaw Ghetto, examined in-depth during Yael Hersonski’s A Film Unfinished. In fact, the two documentaries would pair up provocatively.

Of course, there are also talking heads, including Samuel Kassow, whose eponymous book served as a road map for Grossman’s film. Much like Grossman’s Blessed is the Match: The Life and Death of Hannah Senesh, WWWOH also incorporates dramatic re-enactments. These live-action interludes work well enough, because they recreate moment of high danger and intrigue, but they lack a central figure who is comparably compelling as the tragically young and idealistic Senesh.

WWWOH has been positioned as a documentary on Ringelblum and the Oyneg Shabbos, but it really uses them as a mirror to reflect the Warsaw Ghetto. Patrons who want the nuts and bolts on how the archive was assembled would probably be better directed towards Kassow’s book. Nevertheless, Grossman’s film will undoubtedly be eye-opening for many viewers, but there could be expectations issues for those better versed on the Warsaw Uprising and Holocaust history in general. It is not as richly entertaining as the Above and Beyond, Grossman’s rip-roaring chronicle of the creation of the Israeli Air Force, but WWWOH clearly has a different reason for being.

You can be sure WWWOH is a well-intentioned, worthy film. The Hon. Ronald Lauder, former Ambassador to Austria and current president of the World Jewish Congress would not be on-board as an executive producer if that was not the case. Recommended for general audiences, Who Will Write Our History? opens tomorrow (1/18) in New York, at the Quad.

The Zookeeper’s Wife: Zoology in Wartime

The National Socialists were compulsive looters. In addition to systematically ransacking Europe’s great art collections, they also helped themselves to the rare breeds that survived in occupied zoos. Perhaps the most notorious case was the plundering of the Warsaw Zoo, led by the formerly respected zoologist Lutz Heck. However, Dr. Jan and Antonina Zabinski responded with secret defiance, sheltering hundreds of Jewish fugitives within zoo grounds. Diane Ackerman’s bestselling nonfiction account of the Zabinskis’ heroic resistance gets the big screen treatment in Niki Caro’s The Zookeeper’s Wife (trailer here), which opens tomorrow in New York.

Dr. Jan Zabinski was the official director of the Warsaw Zoo (as well as Superintendent of Warsaw’s city parks), but the staff universally recognized his wife Antonina as an unofficial co-director. Even a visiting Germany zoologist with the Bond villain name of Lutz Heck acknowledged her expertise at handling animals. Indeed, she made quite an impression. Following the signing of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and the joint German-Soviet invasion of Poland, Heck returns to help himself to the zoo’s prized animals. He pretends he will merely hold them for safe-keeping and they pretend to believe him. After all, at the point in the war, Germany really did look like a safer harbor for them to live, no matter how temporarily.

Heck returns yet again to pursue his bizarre project to genetically cross-breed the Auroch, a dead species of wild cattle back into existence, utilizing the zoo’s facilities. One would think an extinct bovine would not be the sort of symbolism the National Socialists would want to associate with the Third Reich, but somehow, they did indeed believe the late, lamented Auroch represented Aryan purity, or something. Regardless, Heck becomes a constant presence at the zoo, which offers a measure of protection from the occupying authorities but also represents a constant threat of danger.

By this time, the Zabinskis were sheltering dozens of Polish Jews. Some stayed only a few days, while others spent most of the war years in the cellar of the zoo villa. Under Heck’s pompous nose, Dr. Zabinski developed a system with the chairman of the Jewish council to regularly smuggle Jews out of the ghetto. Inevitably, he would also join the Home Army and fight during the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, but his capture will leave his wife and their young son Ryszard in a precarious position.

This really is an incredible story of courage and sacrifice, plus it has furry mammals. However, parents should keep in mind this is a PG-13 movie. It has a tremendous message, but the film does not water down just how perilous the wartime conditions were for the animals. There are no actual scenes of concentration camps, but observant viewers will recognize Dr. Janusz Korczak (memorably depicted in Andrzej Wajda’s Korczak) and his children during the Treblinka deportations (and everyone should understand the fate that awaited them).

Caro and cinematographer Andrij Parekh create some strikingly surreal imagery through the juxtaposition of the Eden-like zoo and its exotic creatures with the horrific realities of war. However, Caro and screenwriter Angela Workman give Dr. Zabinski’s extensive involvement with the Home Army rather short shrift.

Regardless, the film gets the broad strokes right, vividly capturing a sense of the constant fear the Zabinskis lived with. Jessica Chastain directly conveys the titular character’s comfort with animals and her hesitancy around people, but she is clearly trying to do something misguidedly Streepian with her slip-sliding accent. Still, she and the (Flemish) rock solid Johan Heldenbergh develop some subtle but powerful chemistry as the Zabinskis. Between this film and Vincent Pérez’s Alone in Berlin, Daniel Brühl is in very real danger of being typecast as an impotent Nazi hack, but he gives the film a bit of an edge as the creepy Heck.

This is such a remarkable story it is downright baffling nobody tried to tell it before. Caro and Workman consistently opt for mainstream decorum, but they arguably deserve credit for underplaying the obvious “people in a zoo” metaphor. Respectfully recommended for general audiences, The Zookeeper’s Wife opens tomorrow (3/31) in New York, at the Lincoln Plaza Cinema.

Deconstructing Propaganda: A Film Unfinished

In any documentary film, each and every visual and sound-bite has been carefully chosen. Consideration of what might have been left out is just as important as what is included. Unfortunately, the ability to actively scrutinize and parse images on-screen has atrophied in the general film-going public. If it is in a documentary, it must be true, is the too common, too passive assumption many make. That is why Yael Hersonski’s A Film Unfinished (trailer here) is important, both as a historical documentary in its own right and an object lesson in critically dissecting propaganda, which opens this Wednesday at the Film Forum.

Innocuously labeled “Ghetto,” for years the film inside a dusty can discovered in an East German vault was taken at face value as an accurate representation of life in the Warsaw Ghetto, slowly creeping into many documentaries of the Holocaust. A strange artifact, the never-completed film included scenes of both extreme suffering as well as images of wealthy Jews living ostensibly happy and prosperous lives in the Ghetto. However, the extent to which the entire so-called Warsaw Ghetto film, particularly the episodes designed to stoke class envy, was deliberately staged by its film crew only became apparent with the discovery of nearly half an hour of outtakes. In Unfinished, Hersonski shows the audience the entire surviving Warsaw Ghetto footage, with the help of a handful of surviving residents of the Warsaw Ghetto, who provide crucial context to understand just what really happened while the cameras were rolling.

Not so much a deconstruction in the contemporary academic sense, Unfinished is more a forensic inquiry into Warsaw's production. Viewers see nearly all the extant footage, including many retakes and the occasional stray cameraman. We see the Potemkin footage as well, but with the additional knowledge of whom and what were outside of the camera’s chosen field of vision. As a result, it is clear Warsaw is not an accurate portrayal of how things were. Just what their propaganda plans were for the film remains somewhat murky, despite the discovery of a surviving cameraman, who not surprisingly tries to present their filming in the best possible light.

In addition to methodically analyzing the film and providing much needed context, Unfinished also acts as a corrective to notions (which Warsaw not coincidentally contributed to) that the Jewish Ghettos created by the National Socialists might have been uncomfortably cramped, but were not deadly per se. However, as Hersonski and her interview subjects make vividly clear, the Ghetto was indeed an environment intended to cause death and suffering, lacking only the fearful efficiency of the camps.

Recently, Unfinished has been at the center of a small controversy when the MPAA bestowed an R rating on the film for “disturbing images of Holocaust atrocities including graphic nudity.” While there are indeed such images in the film, they are never presented in a titillating or lurid manner. It is a problematic ruling because Unfinished is an educational film on multiple levels. Yet, in an odd way, it underscores the film’s point that images on film can have an insidious power on people’s perceptions. Meticulously assembled and scrupulously responsible in its treatment of admittedly “disturbing” imagery, Unfinished is a challenging but highly recommended work of nonfiction filmmaking. It opens this Wednesday (8/18) in New York at Film Forum.