Here's another film that had been sitting on my shelf, waiting for the moment I would have find the time to watch it. I'm glad that lst night I finally did!
On the first glance Agnieszka Holland's
Europa Europa (or
Hitlerjunge Salomon as it was originally called) looks like yet another holocaust survival story, but it is such a well crafted piece of cinema that it deserves its place.
The film narrates the story of Salomon Perel, a Jewish boy in his teens, escaping the Nazis to the Soviet occupied Poland. He is eventually captured by the Germans, but manages to convince them that he is a German orphan called Josef Peters. After spending some time at the frontline as a sort of a company mascot, he gets transferred into a high-profile Nazi school.
Throughout the movie Salomon's main focus is in trying to convince everyone that he is an ethnic German, which is not always easy for a sexually awakened, handsome teen boy with girls, older women and even men admiring and making direct advances on him. With good luck and the recklessness of a teenager he survives, but eventually the burden of denying his true background starts to become too heavy to bear.
Much like Roman Polanski's
The Pianist,
Europa Europa is a great portrayal of the survival of an individual, but with a slightly lighter touch. It's impressive that although the movie takes its subject matter seriously and shows the brutality of the war and holocaust, it it is still not afraid of comedic scenes - my favourite being one where a teacher demonstrates on Salomon how science can prove that he is a true aryan.
Directed with precision and with high class performances by the cast, this is a film easy to appreciate. At times the story felt a bit too unlikely to be plausible, but those feelings were washed away by the appearance of the real Salomon Perel at the end of the movie; this is based on a true story.