Fugitive Pieces

The quality of Ann Michaels' original text shines through this sentimental adaptation by director Jeremy Podeswa. From the opening shot in which a young Polish Jew, Jacob (Robbie Kay) watches from his hiding place as his mother and father are killed by Nazis and his sister is dragged off to an unspecified fate the film never manages to go beyond the cinematically conventional. Jacob is saved by a Greek archeologist (Rade Sherbedgia) who takes him to Hydra and eventually Canada where the adult Jacob (now played by Stephen Dillane) marries a bubbly blonde (Rosamund Pike) whose irrepressible joie de vivre only depresses him more as he writes a book about the Holocaust and mourns his sister.

There you pretty much have the problem with the film. Jacob is so dissociated in the face of so much good fortune that one cannot feel any empathy for him. When Alex leaves him he doesn't bat an eyelid. Surely redemption should be earned but when after some years and he is an academic and a successful writer, he meets the true love of his life, yet another ravishing beauty (Ayelet Zurer) who immediately falls for him you want to cry out “enough already” (it gets worse as he takes her to a picture postcard Greek village and she weeps as she reads his sensitive writings). Only in movies is life this benign.

Fugitives Pieces is a polished production and that is its principal problem - it is too polished. Everyone and everything is too good-looking to be taken as real and Podeswa’s treatment of the story employs cliché after cliché. If anything, films about the Holocaust should make us pause and reflect. Fugitives Pieces at best gives us the opportunity to escape. Theodor Adorno famously said that after Auschwitz it was not possible to write poetry. I wish Podeswa had heeded his words.

 

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