![]() By the film's end it has evolved into a real tear jerker, presenting the overwhelming sadness that the characters have had to bear, from 1941 to the present. I believe the alternating between 19 was done effectively. The story of the past is interspersed with the story of the wife thirty years later when she has become a famous cellist and returns to Poland to receive an award. Ultimately the husband chooses his family over the farmer, and they take their chances by leaving the farmer's home and joining the Jews being marched to god knows where. ![]() They enter into a relationship and the scorned wife wants out. The remaining child and the parents stay at the home of a local farmer who also happens to be in love with the husband in the couple, as he was her doctor. Along the way one of their young daughters is killed. In this case, a Jewish couple left their home in order to avoid Nazi capture. It shows how people would tolerate just about anything to save their own lives and the lives of their loved ones. I've seen many Holocaust and WWII films, and for me Spring 1941 is up there among the best of them. A very dark, but worthwhile film, though the "classic war movie" label is somewhat misleading. The final scenes are harrowing but answer the many questions which had been earlier posed. Wartime yes, but Catholic Poland is still Catholic Poland. Emilia's expectations increase incrementally and she wants this new union to have legitimacy. For her part though she has become resigned to survival, even at the cost of her marriage and so she sanctions this parlous and already tempestuous relationship. And he does, albeit reluctantly, for his wife is after all just upstairs. On the pretext that Clara's "Jewish appearance" would be a liability if she were to be anywhere but up in the loft, and that Artur could pass as a local (a visiting brother?) she encourages him to do the necessary work around the farm and thus be in a position to spend more time with her. His wife upstairs though is an inconvenience. Emilia has long held a torch for Artur (she confesses to him that she had once visited his surgery for an examination while not actually being ill), and his presence here could be a mutually beneficial one, despite the danger in which it places her. ![]() Rural Emilia is forlornly awaiting her husband's return from the front and she takes the family in, giving them shelter in her loft. Based on the life of composer Ida Fink, it paints a very bleak picture indeed, and a very complex one, emotionally. Another movie told in flash-back, this follows the plight of Jewish surgeon Artur Planck, his wife Clara and their family as they seek to escape persecution in occupied Poland. She in turn seeks out a country farmhouse and its owner, but is left in no doubt that she is not welcome there. Renowned composer and musician returns to Poland with her daughter for the opening of a concert hall dedicated in her honour. The actors do a great job of selling the story, and the script does a great job of showing a human dilemma of conflicting priorities with life and death at stake. But if you accept that the emphasis lies where it does, then you'll certainly be glad that for once Uri Barbash directed a script by an independently successful playwright rather than by his brother Benny (no offense intended). It could be that audiences were surprised by the relative weight of the indoor part of the story, where everything depends on the interaction of the actors and their movement in a space no bigger than a stage and by the relative weight of the interplay between the characters living in fear of the Nazis, as opposed to actual encounters with the Nazis themselves. And the screenwriter, Motti Lerner, does in fact write mostly for the stage. ![]() Because so much of the film occurs in the small space of a peasant's hut, you could mistake it for a stage play with a few cinematic scenes tacked on. The filmmakers went to the trouble of shooting much of this movie in Poland, and maybe they benefited from something invisible in the atmosphere but there is rather little happening outdoors in the movie and I couldn't have told whether it was shot in Poland or in Poughkeepsie. ![]()
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