| Just as serious films about the Vietnam War haunted the 1980s, so now in the late 1990s World War II is the war of choice for filmmakers. Except that not all are so serious. If in 1998 Life Is Beautiful could make filmviewers ponder about the need for hope and humor to make life meaningful, now in 1999 we have Jakob the Liar (with Robin Williams in the title role), with far more epigrams that only ends (to quote from the film) when the curtain falls. A remake of an East German film of 1974, Jakob the Liar‘s release was delayed when Life Is Beautiful made such a big hit last year; the physician Dr. Kirschbaum in the 1999 version is played by Armin Mueller-Stahl, who was in the original version in German. The film depicts the a Jewish ghetto in 1944 Poland, where men and women are worked hard unloading bags of cement from boxcars. Filmed in Hungary and Poland, the ghetto is divided from the rest of the city with barbed wire fences and high walls (the latter resembling the wall at the end of Richard Fleischer’s 10 Rillington Place (1970), recalling the scene of a serial murder from a film that so shocked the British that Parliament abolished the death penalty). Jews are forbidden to leave the ghetto unless under military escort, must observe an 8 p.m. curfew, and they cannot have a radio or other source of news. When the film begins, Jakob chases a newspaper that is blown over the wall by the wind, ending up at the fence, where an obtuse sentry tells him to report to the Gestapo headquarters for violating the curfew despite the fact that it is a few minutes before 8 p.m. While in an office, awaiting an officer’s arrival, he hears on the radio that Russian troops are 400 km away in Bezanika, Poland. The officer releases Jakob, since the curfew has not started, but as he tries to return to the ghetto, the gate closes; searching feverishly for a way back, he runs into ten-year-old Lina Kronstein (played by Hannah Taylor-Gordon), who has escaped from a train taking her parents to a death camp. She finds a gap in the fence, they crawl through, and he proceeds to house her in the attic of his café in an Anne Frank manner. However, he leaks to his friend Mischa (played by Live Schreiber) about the proximity of Russian troops, a fact only explicable as it spreads throughout the ghetto if Jakob Heym has a secret radio. Next, Jakob’s friends beg for more news, and he comes up with credible lies, and soon the suicide rate in the ghetto plummets to zero. Hope has produced joy. However, some of his friends fear that informers will tip off the Germans, leading to repression, and they are correct. Although Jakob confesses to the Gestapo that he was lying, and they demand that he tell the Jews in a public square, he refuses and is shot, But the advance of the Russian army forces the Germans to abandon the town, and the Jews are put on a death train that is intercepted at the end of the story by Russian tanks. The film is chock full of Rodney Dangerfieldisms, but I recommend seeing the film on a Saturday night with a large audience to enjoy the laughter; perhaps the high point is reached when Jakob tries to simulate a BBC broadcast to Lina (reminiscent of Groucho Marx’s telephone operator scene from A Day at the Races). Yet another plus about the film is the music, the most delightful film score that I have heard since The Sting (1973). For those who remember life in the ghetto as unbearable, the film’s piles of dead bodies, public hangings, and torture victims may be a considerable disappointment, but director Peter Kassovitz’s parents were sent to concentration camps and survived. However, the film is based on fiction, the novel Jakob le menteur by Jurek Becker, who spent part of his boyhood in the Lodz ghetto and concentration camps in Poland. The message is more eloquent and weightier than Life Is Beautiful: Jews have survived for thousands of years of oppression because they have their wits and their wit, both mightier than the sword, and the world as a result is much better off. MH |