France 2004
Directed by
Richard Dembo
106 minutes
Rated PG
Reviewed by
Bernard Hemingway
Maison De Nina, La
Richard Dembo’s film looks at a neglected aspect of the Holocaust – the effect on the children of those who died in the concentration camps. Opening towards the end of WW2 its story is centred on Nina (Agnès Jaoui) who runs a home outside Paris for such children. Initially she is having a reasonably easy time of looking after French kids whose parents have been deported by the Nazis but when the war ends and the firstly the facts about the extermination camps and then some teenage survivors from Buchenwald arrive things become more difficult for Nina as in various ways her charges face up to the realities of life.This kind of heartfelt, moralizing story-telling is hard to pull off and Dembo sometimes tends to get heavy-handed, for example with a long tracking shot of mournful children looking though the train window as they arrive at the station prior to going to the home. Then, rather like Louis Malle’s Au Revoir Les Enfants (1987), the film has a too glossy look that ill fits the subject matter and removes it from a sense of real immediacy. Thus, when the well-fed Buchenwald survivors arrive, their panicky, herd-like behaviour feels incongruous. The film is largely illustrative of the director’s purpose (Dembo based it on the experiences of the real-life Nina), rather than any internal dramatic dynamic although that purpose undoubtedly has merit.
DVD Extras: None
Available from: Madman
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