Divided We Fall: Stands Tall
The celluloid has never been devoid of war films. Time and again there has been one or more of those, generously dipped into the period of the Holocaust and discovering stories hence. I have never had a natural pull towards these epics but have not been completely alienated either. The intention is quite there, to give me, a slice of the past, more oft focusing distinctively on the horrors that certain periods and the certain people then gave birth to. Comprehensible yet always distant. No matter what the narrative, any character there in was always an embodiment of one of the various larger forces at play. Strong or weak. The victim or the victimiser. The revolter or the spy. They got defined thus. The story then seemed to play at that broader level throughout with definite boundaries drawn for the parts. Doesn’t quite work for me.
Recently, I come across a film that tears through all this and removes every such limitation. Not deliberately, but as I see it now, very naturally. Czech film-maker Jan Hrebejk’s Musíme si pomáhat (Divided We Fall). [Trailer]. Moving away from the perspective of the collective, the director closes in on a husband and wife (Josef, Marie) living in German occupied Czechoslovakia (the early forties). A couple that isn’t immune to the terror that looms yet trying to maintain a regular working-class household. Its only a matter of time that the sadistic brutality of the outside finds its way into their home. It does. The trigger – the act of shielding David, who appears at the doorstep seeking a place to hide. A Jew, he is the son of Josef’s former employer. Josef doesn’t think twice before taking him in. Its just simply the right thing to do. And its this that threatens to snare the duo. 
The peripheral characters now take centrestage. The nuisance of the occasional self-imposed visits of Horst, an acquaintance and now a Nazi collaborator, seemed just right to be ignored. Until now. The neighbours. The watchful eye of the German officers. What does the couple have to do now, to survive? ‘You wouldn’t believe what abnormal times do to normal people’ Josef once remarks. It is precisely this (even though an afterthought from Josef), that leads the rest of the story. Keeping Horst, the neighbours and the Germans at bay compels the couple to take decisions that almost always fall out of their boundaries of rectitude. ‘But we have to, if we are to live’ says either. To convince the other half. One solution guarantees another predicament that again makes them push their limits. 
Everytime raising questions, Hrebejk slowly builds a kind of ethical puzzle. Getting a sniff of David’s presence Horst gets vindictive. Josef, Marie respond in kind. But the price to be paid? Even Horst isnt spared. David too isn’t the silent victim out here. Moments of panic do make him want to leap before he looks. Is Josef completely welcoming to David? Do the dynamics at home change with the entry of the third? Marie, how does she reconcile? Each act then, takes the characters up or down the morality scale. Hrebejk is not sparing in action yet he draws the characters such that I couldn’t but empathize with them. Simple people who get caught in the larger picture of what is happening around them and unwittingly then, become pawns. Yet, in their respective lives they aren’t completely so and find their way 
through the mess, struggling. At times succeeding, at times faltering. Josef has his virtues and it doesn’t exaggerate or tone down his failings or insecurities. I guess, the others too. Horst, on the other hand, seems very opportunistic yet those few constructive character-turns brought hope that his moral fibre isn’t completely corrupted.
Its amazing how the actors seem to have imbibed this to give an ingenuous feel to the narrative. During certain moments, the director runs the scenes quicker – the kind that silent films used. A sudden knock at the door and the food has to be stashed away hurriedly. When David has to be hidden. When, before the climax Josef pleads with Marie and David. The camera just hovers over the characters who are just mostly shadows thrown up by a single lit lamp. Its freakish. And somewhat distracting. The characters, Josef and Marie, the slightly overbearing portrait of the Madonna and the final act when Josef decides to remove the painting thinking that it’d help Marie and David did seem to be a religious allegory but it kind of stopped just there for me. I comprehended it in its entirety much later.
I really liked this film. What Nazism means is seen through the inside of the home of this undemanding couple. The fear, the helplessness, the terror, the guilt all take form here finally letting hope and redemption emerge.
I do not know much about Czech movies. Browsing to find the movie-portal if it exists still (2000, this movie was released in) or some such info, I came across this at Czech Television-Cinema. Don’t read the synopsis. Detailed with some spoilers maybe. Some clips. You could. Do watch the movie first. Let it make its mark in your mind, whatever it may be. Then scour the net for more.
Tags: Czech films, World Cinema
Anurag Kashyap
Abhay Deol
Dibakar Banerjee
Hansal Mehta
Khalid Mohamed
Kundan Shah
Anish Kuruvilla
Jaideep Verma
Manish Gupta
Navdeep Singh
Bhavani Iyer
D. Santosh
Onir
Ashvin Kumar
Ramu Ramanathan
Sudhir Mishra
Pankaj Advani
Revathy
Saurabh Shukla
Shilpa Shukla
Sujoy Ghosh
Suparn Verma
Santosh Sivan
Shashank Ghosh
Shivajee
Pavan Kaul
Partho Sen-Gupta
Prroshant Naryannan
Sam Langoria
Satish Kasetty
you are on a roll watching movies related to holocaust. Is it by conscious choice? A human tragedy on many levels that was. I still think ten times before summing up courage to even pick up a lesser movie on the subject like ‘Defiance’.