Survivre avec les loups (2008) - film review

Eight-year-old Misha lives with her Jewish parents in Brussels.  It is 1942 and the country is under Nazi occupation.  Daily, scores of Jews are arrested by German soldiers and loaded onto trains destined for concentration camps in the East.  When her parents fail to collect her from school one day, Misha is placed with a host family, but, fearing arrest themselves, they betray her.  Misha only just evades capture and flees into the open countryside, with only a compass to guide her.  She decides to head eastwards, hoping to be reunited with her parents.  But the journey proves to be an ordeal.  She must steal what she needs to survive.  Exhausted and starving, she encounters a white wolf with whom she has an instant rapport.  With the wolf’s help, Misha manages to stay alive.  But will she reach her destination...?

Adapted from Misha Defonseca’s purportedly auto-biographical novel Misha: A Mémoire of the Holocaust Years, a worldwide best-seller, Survivre avec les loups is a well-meaning attempt to introduce youngsters to the horrors of the Holocaust.  Alas, what is no doubt a laudable aim is compromised by the film’s inability to engage with the spectator at anything above a very superficial level and a nauseating tendency to oversimplify some very complex themes.  The production values are generally impressive and there are one or two moments of genuine heart-wrenching poignancy, but for all that the film is something of a toothless beast, lacking both substance and forward momentum.  After a heavily clichéd intro, which retreads the now sadly familiar Jew-round up scenario, the film loses its way and struggles to keep us interested as the sweet little heroine turns into the female equivalent of Truffaut’s Enfant sauvage.  The heavy ennui is periodically relieved only by the occasional excursion into grotesque Dawn of the Dead style nastiness.  If the sight of a small girl hungrily chewing on live worms, gorging on a rabbit’s blood-soaked carcass and picking over the gory entrails of other fauna doesn’t cause you to bring up your popcorn and make a dash for the nearest public convenience nothing will.

Survivre avec les loups is a slight improvement on director Véra Belmont’s previous film, the overblown and pretty vacuous Marquise (1997), impressing most with stark visuals that imbue the film with a biting reality and a dark lyrical quality.  The film’s main achievement is that it does convey something of the brutality of the era in which it is set, through the suffering of the individuals who had to live through it.  This sense of confusion, rape and extreme psychological distress is powerfully focused through the performance of the film’s star, Mathilde Goffart, who portrays the 8-year-old Misha with a winning combination of feisty realism and angelic charm.  Goffart possesses both an innocence and a savage quality, making her character convincing and likeable, although her efforts are at times criminally undermined by the script.  Is it necessary for Misha to scream out loud what is in her head, even when she knows perfectly well that she is within target range of a gang of psychopathic German soldiers?  How much more effective it would have been if she had remained silent and expressed her physical and spiritual torment in more subtle ways.  Alas, subtlety appears to be in very short supply in this film.

The film suffers from unfavourable comparisons with the previously released Le Renard et l’enfant (2007), which offers a similar but far more credible depiction of a young child forming an empathic bond with a wild animal (without the distraction of gun-toting Nazis and George A. Romero-style lunch-breaks).  Not long after the film’s release, a storm of controversy broke when Monique De Wael (alias Misha Defonseca) openly declared on the internet that her novel was not, as she had hitherto claimed, autobiographical, but was in fact entirely fictitious.  Not only did she not make the fantastic journey that is described in her book, but she was not even Jewish.  Having lost its claim to be based on a true story, Survivre avec les loups appears to be an even less palatable proposition.  There are much kinder  and more effective ways to educate your children about the Holocaust - show them Alain Resnais’s documentary Night and Fog (1955) or make a trip to the Auschwitz Museum.  What we can do without is fiction masquerading as truth to allow someone to make a fast buck.

© James Travers 2011

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