Philadelphia Weekly - 05/01/2008 
A well-dressed old lady strolls through the Warsaw ghetto with a haughty look, as if sneering at its dirt and chaos. She seems out of place, wealthy and cultured, even arrogant. She gets to her destination, a dark apartment, and we slowly learn why she's there-a desperate Jewish family is giving her their young daughter to sit out the war in the countryside. The old woman's getting paid but is still reluctant: "You people are caring but I'm not," she bluntly tells them.
Soon we discover the old woman is actually the family's old housekeeper, saddled with a mean, thieving daughter and tortured by memories of her happy youth when she loved dancing and could've landed a rich husband. And so the movie becomes as much about class differences-and the randomness of fate-as about the Holocaust.
Like Roman Polanski's classic Holocaust drama The Pianist, this Polish film concentrates on what life was like for ordinary people in the middle of the war. From moment to moment, no one knows what's going to happen or how they'll react. Even if someone wants to do the right thing, it's not always clear what that is-or how to do it.
Brutally unsentimental, the story makes clear that doing the right thing and behaving morally aren't easy choices, even in a traumatic setting. Some people casually do bad things, some people casually do good things, some people waver-but the Holocaust doesn't automatically make them noble or self-sacrificing. The film creates a strikingly persuasive vision of life during wartime by sticking close to the realities of believable people acting in plausibly conflicted and uncertain ways.
It's worth seeing just for the amazing performance of Polish star Ryszarda Hanin as the old woman. Looking like a cross between patrician Jessica Tandy and wary Agnes Moorehead, the veteran actress, in her last movie before her death, cycles through a lifetime of moods and memories. Harsh and bitter in one context, she's girlishly flirtatious on a train ride and then blissfully wistful in the forest, dancing alone in a childhood reverie.
The story's ending remains ambiguous-a little frustrating, yet fitting for a movie focused on life's unpredictability. "Mother of God! What a person can come to!" moans the old woman at one point. In this powerfully concentrated vision, the Holocaust, the divide between rich and poor, and arbitrary acts of fate all add up to the same message: Life is unfair. A |
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