Va, vis et deviens (2005) - film review

In 1984, a humanitarian crisis descends on the Sudan as thousands of Africans fleeing famine swell the make-shift camps.  Israel and the United States launch a vast operation to expatriate several thousand Jewish Ethiopians to Israel.  One of the evacuees is nine year old Schlomo, whose Christian mother stayed behind after putting him in the care of another woman.  When this woman dies shortly after their arrival in Israel, Schlomo is adopted by a young family in Tel-Aviv.  As he grows up, Schlomo not only has to reconcile himself with his confused past and the memory of a mother he may never see again, but he must also make some sense of the fractured world around him, a world of extreme racism and interminable religious hatred...

Va, vis et deviens is the third full-length film from Radu Mihaileanu, an ambitious semi-autobiographical work that explores issues of race and identity through the traumatic experiences of a displaced African refugee.  As in Mihaileanu’s impressive previous films, Trahir (1993) and Train de vie (1998), this film paints a portrait of intense personal experience against a grand historical backdrop, and so has a sense of both the epic and the intimate.  Unfortunately, as in these earlier films, Mihaileanu has a habit of sometimes being too preachy, too demonstrative, in a way that undermines the film’s realism and emotional impact.   Too many shots of tear-stained faces, too many obvious clichés...

With a runtime of almost two and half hours, the film is also way too long for the story it has too tell.  This would be less of a problem if it weren’t for the fact that it also feels somewhat uneven and aimless, with no clear underlying message to guide or reward the spectator. The first half of the film is quite compelling, with a truthful depiction of the child’s Schlomo painful experiences in his adopted country, but then the focus dissolves and viewer-interest wanes as Schlomo moves into adolescence and early adulthood. The film does have some strengths, however.  It is generally well-scripted, beautifully shot and has a number of sequences – such as the opening shots in the refugee camps – that are extraordinarily potent and leave a lasting impression.  If only the narrative were a little tighter and bled of its occasional slips into awkward sentimentality, this would have been a much greater film.

© James Travers 2008

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