Jerusalem Film Festival 2010 Opens with La Rafle

A screening of the French Holocaust film ‘La Rafle’ (The Round up) kicked-off the 27th annual Jerusalem International Film Festival. The film, written and directed by Roselyne Bosch, is about the infamous Vel’ d’Hiv Roundup, in which the French police carried out Nazi orders and deported over 13,000 Jews to internment camps, before handing them over to the Nazis. Most of the Jews were then sent to Auschwitz.

 This event is one of the darkest stains left by Pétain’s Vichy government, and it took until 1995 for the French government to acknowledge it, in a dramatic apology delivered by then president Jacques Chirac.

 The film begins a few weeks before the round-up, in June of 1942, where the influence of the occupation is felt everywhere, with more and more restrictions placed upon the Jewish population of Paris. The opening titles sequence is the very ironic and angry juxtaposition of documentary footage of Hitler the city of lights -his most recent conquest- and a romantic French song, an ode to the city. Right up front, Bosch is anouncing the film’s raison d’être- reminding the French of the shame of the collaboration.
 
That is an admirable goal and a valuable history lesson. But up against those good intentions stands the hugely problematic fact: The Holocaust film is one of the most problematic of all genres- a practically impossible one.

 Of all the many films on the topic made, I have only ever seen one that is almost entirely morally unimpeachable- Alain Resnais’ ‘Night and Fog’, from 1955. That is one of the first films to deal with subject, and that black and white documentary short film is still one of the few films on the topic that still shocks and rattles and devastates 55 years later. Since that film’s release however, so many films have been made, so many books have been written, so many pictures seen, that the subject has become palatable, the terms surrounding it cheapened through over-use.
  
This was particularly evident a couple of years ago, when a slew of American and British Holocaust movies came out, and they ranged from mediocre to absolutely loathsome in their morality. In an effort to make the topic more accessible, filmmakers have been looking for unique personal angles to hinge their films on. That’s how we end up with films like ‘The Reader’, where the real tragedy is that Kate Winslett’s Nazi guard couldn’t read. Or ‘The Boy and the Striped Pajamas’, which seems to be bored by Jews dying, and only gets really worked up when the cute Nazi kid is lead into the gas chambers by accident. Or ‘Good’, a terrible film in most respects, about a nice German guy who doesn’t realize the Holocaust was going on until it was too late to speak up.

 With these recent films painfully and infuriatingly stuck in my mind, I was not looking forward to ‘La Rafle’. But director Bosch, along with her husband, producer Alain Goldman –who originated the project- have crafted a well-intentioned and somber film that is a huge improvement over the shocking idiocy and bad taste that typified most Holocaust films since ‘The Pianist’.

 The film’s beats are familiar, and many of the points it tries to get across come off as hollow, as by now we have become numb to much of the horror of the Holocaust. But at a few moments, it manages to capture something close to the abstract horror the topic requires.

 After being rounded-up by the French police, the Jewish families are confined to a massive in-door stadium. Bosch shows this stadium as a surreal space, with people dying and children laughing and policemen patrolling and plumbers assisting- like a terrifying circus. The description might make it sound objectionable, but it achieves a level of the surreal that manages to capture the tiniest sense of the inexplicable nature of the Holocaust, a far more honest and laudable take on the subject than most films feature, and in fact it is the only portion of the film that feels like it is not trying to convince you that what happened was really, really wrong. In capturing the insanity, it de-familiarizes the images we’ve seen hundreds of times and arrives at the topic with somewhat fresh eyes, free of bleeding-heart speechifying or sentimentality.

 The rest of the film is subtle emotional bullying that, much to my chagrin, I found difficult to completely resist. These sequences are intercut extremely bluntly with scenes that seek to detail exactly how complicit and guilty the Vichy regime and Pétain were in this matter. Particularly distracting were periodic cuts to an actor portraying Hitler, who is even shown at one point to be less evil than some his French collaborators. These scenes leave the desired impression (Vichy=bad), but they are also entirely out of place, feeling didactic and throwing the film’s pace out of whack. Whatever the sequence’s tone is gets confused by these cuts, which deflate the drama and turn it into a history lesson. These problems and others (like a particularly tone-deaf final sequence) doom the film to go into the “…but they meant well” section of the movie spectrum. ‘La Rafle’ is sincere and laudably inoffensive, but  aside from one very good sequence, doesn’t really add a great deal to the table beyond a history lesson.

SHLOMO PORATH