BEFORE: After today I'm going back out of town again, just a ride on Amtrak up to Massachusetts to see my folks and go out for Father's Day. I feel like a bad son if I don't go and stay with them for a week in the spring, but then again, I don't know if I can deal with them for that long, so two days it is.
Adding "Billy Elliot" to my chain turned out to be a little stroke of genius, because initially I was going to watch "First Man" on Sunday, but now the extra film has pushed a different film on to Father's Day, and it's going to be so blissfully ironic. Here I was complaining that I really didn't have a Father's Day tie-in, and I should have known, sometimes these things take care of themselves, only in weird ways.
Today, Jamie Bell carries over again from "Billy Elliot" and completes a three-peat.
THE PLOT: Jewish brothers in Nazi-occupied Eastern Europe escape into the Belarussian forests, where they join Russian resistance fighters and endeavor to build a village, in order to protect themselves and about one thousand Jewish non-combatants.
AFTER: I'm finally ready to start with my World War II material, a bit later than I expected, but there's nothing to it but to do it. Two films this week on this topic and then I'll pick it up again in August.
This is a powerful film that's set in a country that we perhaps don't think about enough, Belarus. We're all too familiar with the atrocities of the Nazi concentration camps across Germany and Poland, but it's easy to forget about some of the other, smaller countries in Eastern Europe that were also invaded during World War II and also had their Jewish populations devastated by a group of madmen. And there's a ripple effect, too - it's not JUST that Jews were systematically killed, but the fact that their own countrymen were forced by the Nazis to turn them in, because those people were too afraid that they would share their fate. It might seem like the lesser of two evils, to turn on your friends and neighbors when the invaders come, that way you might get to see another day and maybe live through the war. But at what cost?
This film also highlights the horrors as seen from within, the lack of information about what might have taken place in another city, or even in the next village - for families that were separated, to be unsure if their husband, wife or parents were still alive. Then, to finally get some news from that city, and find out that hardly anyone survived, so their relatives were most likely dead. Still, some Jews chose to remain in the ghetto, refusing to believe that they'd be taken to camps, and then even if they were, the camps were most likely just labor camps, not death camps as some of the rumors stated.
The Bielskis were a group of three (or is it four?) brothers in Belarus who witnessed their parents being killed by local police, under instructions from the Nazis, and they struck out for the forests to hide, and plan their revenge. After tracking down the chief of police and killing him during a family dinner, they stayed in hiding, and more and more Jews joined them in the forest, creating a small nomadic society that evaded Nazi patrols for years. Food was scarce and the winters were rough, and people took "forest wives" and "forest husbands" to cope with the situation, though having children was forbidden, because there wasn't enough food to feed themselves, let alone babies. I'd love to learn the logistics of this, but that's probably TMI for a film to deal with.
Two of the brothers had a falling out, so Tuvia stayed to lead the Jews in the woods, while Zus went off and joined the Soviet partisans to fight the Nazis directly. There are some rather obvious parallels made here to the Book of Exodus, only the Jews here are wandering in a forest, not a desert - but they make references to crossing the Red Sea when they have to escape from patrols through a swamp and a large river.
Even when fighting alongside the Russians, Zus and his fellow Jews were regarded as some kind of second-class citizens, one commander wouldn't share a latrine with a Jewish man, for example. So there was systemic racism even among the Russian "comrades", even though that was strictly forbidden by the tenets of Communism. This may be part of the reason that Communism has never really worked, because while on paper it creates a society where everyone is supposedly equal, in reality there is no such thing. There will always be the high-ranked government and military people, who feel that they deserve more than the commoners and peasants.
Similarly, the society of Jews living out in the woods strove to be a "perfect" society, without racism or sexism, etc. But at first there was a traditional division of labor, the men were assigned to stand guard and the women were expected to cook and sew and do other chores. Eventually the women were trained to shoot also, out of necessity. Still, problems remained as then some of the men claimed that due to being superior fighters, they deserved more food. So even in this nomadic egalitarian society, it was hard to stamp out all traces of Old World sexism.
This is a true story, three of the four brothers survived and later came to the USA to run a trucking company in New York City. Which means this film should be considered on the same company as "Schindler's List", another true story about saving hundreds of Jews from the Nazis.
Also starring Daniel Craig (last seen in "Logan Lucky"), Liev Schreiber (last seen in "Movie 43"), George MacKay (last seen in "Captain Fantastic"), Alexa Davalos, Allan Corduner (last seen in "Florence Foster Jenkins"), Mark Feuerstein (last seen in "What Women Want"), Tomas Arana (last seen in "Guardians of the Galaxy"), Jacek Koman (last seen in "Australia"), Mia Wasikowska (last seen in "Crimson Peak"), Iben Hjejle, Jodhi May, Kate Fahy, Iddo Goldberg, Sam Spruell (last seen in "The Voices"), Martin Hancock (last seen in "24 Hour Party People"), Jonjo O'Neill (last seen in "The Ballad of Buster Scruggs"), Mark Margolis (last seen in "My Big Fat Greek Wedding 2"), Vidas Petkevicius, Ravil Isyanov, Rolandas Boravskis, Leonardas Pobedonoscevas, with archive footage of Adolf Hitler (last seen in "The Doors: When You're Strange").
RATING: 6 out of 10 bottles of vodka
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