Film Review
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
The above content is owned by filmsdefrance.com and must not be copied.
Film Synopsis
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...?
© James Travers
The above content is owned by filmsdefrance.com and must not be copied.