WHO PAYS THE PRICE IN THE DEBT ?
During the Allied occupation of Germany, arrest warrants were served on many Nazis, including Adolf Eichmann and Josef Mengele, both of whom fled the country in the chaos. In 1960, Israelis captured Eichmann in Argentina, and flew him to Israel for trial. They knew that Mengele, the surgeon of Birkenau, was also in Argentina but deferred his capture to a later time. When word of Eichmann’s capture was splashed in headlines, Mengele fled to Paraguay and later to Brazil, where he died in 1979. The film The Debt, a remake of the Israeli film Ha-Hov (2007), imagines that three Mossad agents have tracked down Mengele, calling himself Dieter Vogel (played by Jesper Christensen), as a physician in East Germany during 1965 (though much filming is in Budapest). Their assignment is to bring him back to Israel for trial. Although that escapade is featured in The Debt, the real focus is on a time thirty years later, when one of the trio, Rachel Singer (played by Helen Mirren), is put in the spotlight at a booklaunching by her daughter, who in 1997 has published an account of the raid to much acclaim. Based on her interviews with the trio, the daughter’s book reveals that the raid was botched, Vogel escaped, but Rachel (then played by Jessica Chastain) shot him dead. But the problem is that the story in the book is false, and the real Vogel is in a hospital in Kiev about to tell all to the Ukrainian media. Who will kill Vogel to effect a cover-up of the lie? One member of the trio, Stephan Gold (played by Tom Wilkinson), is now in a wheelchair. A second, David Peretz (played by Ciarán Hinds), walks in front of a truck on the day of the booklaunching and dies. That leaves Rachel as the only one available to murder Vogel—and she cannot live the lie any more. Using flashbacks, the suspense regarding the raid has now dissipated in the film, directed by John Madden, so the question that keeps filmviewers on tenterhooks at the end what she does and why. MH