DIVIDED WE FALL Directed by Jan Hrebejk With Boleslav Polivka, Anna Siskova Plan B PG-13 122 min Subtitles
Divided We Fall, the Czech film that contended against hopeless odds with Crouching Tiger for last year's Foreign Language Film award, has been linked more conspicuously with an earlier foreign Oscar-winner, Life Is Beautiful. Both, it has been said, are movies that turn the warming light of comedy onto the darkness of Nazi atrocities during WWII.
The previews for Divided play up its comic aspect, but in truth, the Czech film has only the most passing kinship with its Italian predecessor. Roberto Benigni's movie used an overtly comic persona to establish a celebration of life that was able to push itself poignantly and resiliently up through the cracks in the pavement of Nazi horror. Jan Hrebejk's, in contrast, is about real people and real situations, into which a certain amount of humor naturally flows, even under the circumstance of Germany's wartime occupation of Czechoslovakia.
In a series of short scenes during the opening credits, Hrebejk runs us through the years leading up to the occupation. In the first, three men are out for a pleasant drive. They are David (Csongor Kassai), the son of a local Jewish industrialist; Josef (Boleslav Polivka), a management employee; and Horst (Jaroslav Dusek), the company chauffeur. The scene shifts forward a couple of years to 1939, and the Jewish family is being evicted from its estate by the Nazis, who have also confiscated the factory. Next it's 1941, and David and his family are being taken from the apartment of Josef and his wife Marie (Anna Siskova), where they've boarded for a couple of years, to be sent to a concentration camp. And then the action moves ahead two more years, to a gaunt and harrowed David escaping from the camp and returning to seek shelter in his old home town.
Nobody tries very hard to be funny in Divided. And when occasionally farcical situations arise in the course of events, as in a scene where David cowers in terror under Marie's bedclothes while she wards off the amorous advances of the Nazi collaborator Horst, terror easily balances the farce. There is nothing very funny about a life-or-death situation when the outcome hangs in the balance.
But Hrebejk's approach is that life, even under terrible circumstances, maintains an aspect of the human comedy. People are funny, whether intentionally or inadvertently. Josef has a quiet sense of humor when he's not cracking under the strain of the terrible risk he's running in sheltering David. Horst has no sense of humor – with a straight face he instructs Josef in how to keep a straight face so as not to let the Germans know what he's thinking.
Divided is illuminated by wonderful performances. Horst is a repulsive opportunistic boor, and yet Dusek plays him with a humanity that makes him real and justifies plot turns at the end. Kassai gives David's hunted terror the support of a quiet strength and dignity. Siskova makes the beautiful Maria a woman of practicality, uncertainty, and decency. And Polivka, one of his country's leading stage, television, and screen stars, brings tremendous depth to his role as Josef, a character he based in part on his father, who lost everything in the war, but `despite being half-broken and unhappy still retained a gentlemanly type of humor.'
`You wouldn't believe what abnormal times can do to normal people,' Josef remarks apologetically to David. Divided is about normal people in abnormal times that bring out the best and the worst in them.
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