This streaming pick finds hope in the suffering… | Little White Lies

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This stream­ing pick finds hope in the suf­fer­ing of war

03 Apr 2020

Words by Charles Bramesco

Close-up of a young woman with a serious expression, looking directly at the camera. Her blonde hair is slightly windswept.
Close-up of a young woman with a serious expression, looking directly at the camera. Her blonde hair is slightly windswept.
Agniesz­ka Holland’s mas­ter­piece Europa Europa is har­row­ing and gor­geous – and now avail­able to watch online.

Anoth­er month has begun, and with it comes a flood of fresh stream­ing titles to slake the thirsts of a pub­lic held cap­tive in their own liv­ing rooms by the threat of coro­n­avirus. In par­tic­u­lar, US cinephiles know that the first of the month means a rota­tion of new con­tent into the Cri­te­ri­on Channel’s eclec­tic library, and this lat­est batch of selec­tions puts a shat­ter­ing Pol­ish clas­sic right in America’s liv­ing rooms.

The unspeak­able hor­rors of war and geno­cide have expe­ri­enced an unset­tling spike in pop­u­lar­i­ty over the last year or so, from the faith under fire of Ter­rence Malick’s A Hid­den Life to the recent restora­tion of Come and See to the upcom­ing release of pun­ish­ing Holo­caust epic The Paint­ed Bird. Fit­ting square­ly into what feels crass to call a trend” would be Agniesz­ka Holland’s now wide­ly-avail­able mas­ter­piece Europa Europa, an addi­tion­al entry in the hyper-spe­cif­ic young man’s episod­ic odyssey through inhos­pitable Nazi ter­rain” micro-genre.

The 1990 film adapts Solomon Perel’s mem­oir pub­lished the year pri­or, a shock­ing account of the atroc­i­ties he wit­nessed as a Jew hid­ing incog­ni­to among the Hitler Youth forces. Hol­land spares no expense to com­mu­ni­cate the extra­or­di­nary degree of suf­fer­ing Per­el endured dur­ing the time he spent as Jupp,” Hitler­ju­gend on the rise; he’s shown the muti­lat­ed bod­ies of his peo­ple, forced to fire upon the inno­cent, bred to hate. Around every turn, there’s sex­u­al humil­i­a­tion or anti-Semi­tism in which he must enthu­si­as­ti­cal­ly par­tic­i­pate or, worst of all, the threat of being dis­cov­ered and sum­mar­i­ly sen­tenced to death.

He sur­vives his cir­cum­stances one at a time, nar­row­ly scram­bling from per­il in Ger­many to per­il in Poland to per­il in the Sovi­et Union and back. His jour­ney is rich with dark irony; a eugenicist’s cer­tain­ty in his abil­i­ty to sniff out Jews by his own broad stereo­typ­ing leaves our ambigu­ous­ly-fea­tured Solomon safe, and a come­ly girl (Julie Delpy) falls for Solomon even as she extols her hatred for every­thing she doesn’t know he stands for. What ini­tial­ly looks like a dread­ed expo­sure when a man walks in on a bathing Solomon and sees that he’s cir­cum­cised turns into some­thing sad­der and more del­i­cate when the man reveals that he’s also hid­ing – as a homosexual.

There’s almost some­thing Gumpian in the way that the thread of his­to­ry wends in and out of the plot, as Solomon stum­bles through Kristall­nacht, Oper­a­tion Bar­barossa, and the cap­ture of Stalin’s son. Hol­land widens her scope to cap­ture the com­plete sweep of cri­sis, and clar­i­fies just how absurd Solomon’s place in it real­ly is by con­stant­ly deal­ing him acci­den­tal suc­cess­es. In spite of him­self, he ris­es up the Nazi lad­der, expos­ing the fun­da­men­tal absur­di­ty of a fas­cism that unwit­ting­ly cham­pi­ons that which it claims to despise.

But there’s no humor in these grim curlicues of fate. Hol­land vis­its the full force of mis­ery upon her audi­ence, and more impor­tant­ly, her work pass­es the Holo­caust-movie smell test of find­ing mean­ing for that mis­ery. Depict­ing such extreme real­i­ties presents the dual pit­falls of over­ween­ing sen­ti­men­tal­i­ty or sadism for its own sake, and Hol­land evades them both by fore­ground­ing the indi­vid­ual, human toll.

We under­stand the val­ue of Solomon’s life, not only because this is a real man’s real strug­gle, but also because he’s respond­ing with the fear that we would. He’s nei­ther hero nor casu­al­ty, depict­ed as an old man (played by the actu­al Solomon Per­el) in the final shot, calm­ly singing from his new home in Israel. Liv­ing a long, nor­mal, con­tent life is his vic­to­ry. Evad­ing his moment, free­ing him­self from his extra­or­di­nar­i­ness, becom­ing an aver­age Jew again – that’s plenty.

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