arts & entertainment

Melanie Laurent

in La Rafle

La Rafle revisits pain of French collaboration.

Michael Fox
Special to the Jewish News

F

or decades after the war, French
filmmakers avoided the subject
of their country's collaboration
during the Nazi Occupation. The late
Louis Malle helped break the silence with
his chilling teenage-fascist saga Lacombe
Lucien (1974) and movingly autobio-
graphical Au Revoir Les Enfants (1987).
The latter film famously centered on
the wartime boarding-school friendship
between a Jewish boy and a Catholic boy
and was all the more wrenching for its
main characters' innocence and naivete.
Children are the least culpable and most

defenseless of victims, a fact that director
Roselyne Bosch parlays to great emotional
effect in her ambitious fact-based 2010
drama, La Rafle ("The Roundup"). Winner
of prizes at film festivals worldwide, the
movie, an often-nuanced depiction of
compassion and cruelty under pressure,
does not flinch from indicting the French
men and women who helped uproot and
deport their Jewish neighbors. Over and
over, it asks what kind of people could
inflict such suffering on children.
Bosch re-creates the spring and
summer of 1942, when some
13,000 Jews were swept up
in the city and suburbs
of Paris over two days

Strokes
Of Genius

17th-century

Michael Fox
Special to the Jewish News

filmmaker forward.
Needless to say — as there wouldn't be
a finished film otherwise — Weissbrod
pushes through her paralyzing doubts to
follow her muse's trail through American
museums and seminars and, most entic-
ingly, Italy's narrow streets.
Artemisia was essentially forgotten for
250 years after her death until the critic
Robert Longhi asserted her reputation in
1916. But in her lifetime, Weissbrod learns,
the artist was a force to be reckoned with.
Taught by her father, the respected
painter Orazio Gentileschi, Artemisia dis-
played exceptional ability as a teenager.
She became the first woman granted
membership in the Florentine Accademia
del Disegno and, at a time when women
artists were relegated to still lifes, painted
female nudes and portraits. Only a few
dozen of her works survive, and, curi-
ously, the most powerful — Susanna and
the Elders, Judith Beheading Holofernes —
are sagas of strong-willed women derived
from Jewish texts. (Another such paint-
ing, Gentileschi's Judith and Maidservant
with the Head of Holofernes, is included

W

hen a middle-aged woman
needs a role model, where
does she look? Ellen
Weissbrod crossed centuries and seas for
her answer, finding inspiration at every
turn.
That's the conceit of A Woman Like
That, the New York filmmaker's peripa-
tetic and engaging first-person docu-
mentary. At low ebb professionally, she
confides at the outset that her career of
significant early promise (denoted by the
1990 documentary Listen Up: The Lives of
Quincy Jones) has devolved into working
on a ceaseless parade of reality TV shows.
Desperate to revive her dormant artis-
tic impulses, yet decidedly unconfident
about her ability to spearhead a movie
project, Weissbrod tentatively embarks
on a multi-angled exploration of the
17th-century Italian painter Artemisia
Gentileschi. A woman of uncommon tal-
ent, brazenness and bravery for her time,
Artemisia is like a beacon pulling the

painter inspires

filmmaker.

and eventually sent to Auschwitz. German
soldiers handled the final stages, but they
would have had no one to murder without
the acquiescence of Marshal Petain and the
efforts of the French police.
La Rafle introduces us to a rather diz-
zying array of characters in its opening
scenes, including 11-year-old Jo Weissman,
his carefree friends and his worried parents
and siblings. The Montmarte lads can't
quite grasp the meaning of the yellow star,
but everyone else worries that further igno-
minies are in store.
Alas, not Jo's bookish father, a World
War I vet who refuses to believe that the
French would allow the persecution of
its Jews. However, he's not privy to the
shadowy deals that the Vichy government
negotiates, not only to hand over the so-
called "stateless" Jews who fled to France
from Germany and Poland in the preced-
ing years, but French nationals as well.
In a slight misjudgment, for its almost
impossible to depict Hitler and Himmler
at this late date without tipping into par-
ody, Bosch shows the head Nazis discuss-
ing the French Jews with but a fraction of
Petain's callous disregard. We discern that
it's easy to see people as an abstraction
— and to decide their fate — from the
distant vantage point of the Wolf's Lair or
Vichy headquarters in central France.
Bosch takes pains to differenti-
ate between the fascist youth
corps, which takes brutal
pleasure in venting its anti-

in the collection of the Detroit
Institute of Arts.)
For Weissbrod, the drama of
Artemisia's life is only slightly less com-
pelling than her art. Artemisia was raped
at 17 by her tutor (a friend of her father's,
in fact), and various biographers and his-
torians connect her powerful studies of
defiant women with that event.
The filmmaker takes a much broader
view, one that acknowledges that
Artemisia benefited from commissions
and the respect of her peers almost from
the beginning. And yet the artist was
often underpaid by clients who wouldn't
have pulled the same trick with a male
painter — a reality she recognized and
vehemently objected to in letters.
Weissbrod's perspective is broad
enough to include literally dozens of
female voices, from art scholars to the
gaggle enlisted to read Artemisia's letters
in on-the-street interviews conducted
outside a 2002 exhibit at the Museum of
Modern Art in New York.
Some tactics and techniques that
Weissbrod employs — split-screens and
quadruple-screens, plucking phrases
from interviews and superimposing
them as onscreen text, a monotonously
insistent score — are less effective. If
the filmmaker's insecurity (voiced more
often than is necessary, frankly) is real

Semitism, and the French cops, many of
whom are ambivalent, if not reluctant,
participants in this heartless travesty.
Amid the pervasive villainy, some people
retained their humanity.
The most vivid example is a fresh-out-of-
school Protestant nurse (played by Jewish
actress Melanie Laurent of Inglorious
Bastards and The Concert, whose own
grandfather survived deportation by the
Nazis), who's assigned to the Velodrome
d'Hiver, where the arrested Jews have been
collected and dumped. Her dedication to
these innocents, especially the children,
compels her to accompany them (and a
Jewish doctor played by Jean Reno) on the
next suffering-laden step of their journey.
Once the majority of the characters are
under one roof at the Velodrome, La Rafle
snaps into linear focus and retains that
intensity all the way through the final shot,
of a child staring hard at the camera —
at the audience, that is — in a wordless
"J'accuse."
La Rafle was a box-office hit in France,
where it was seen by more than 3 million
moviegoers. Li

La Rafle, in French, German and
Yiddish, with English subtitles,
screens 7 p.m. Friday and Saturday
and 2 p.m. Sunday, Oct. 21-23, at the
Detroit Film Theatre in the Detroit
Institute of Arts. $6.50-$7.50.
(313) 833-4005; tickets.dia.org .

Artemisia Gentileschi: Judith Beheading
Holofernes (Uffizi, Florence).

and not a device to frame the film, this
throw-everything-at-the-wall-and-let's-
see-what-sticks approach is a palpable
manifestation.
None of it, however, distracts us from
Artemisia's force of personality and will.
Ultimately, we are most grateful for being
introduced to A Woman Like That. Li

A Woman Like That screens 1 p.m.
Saturday, Oct. 22, at the Detroit
Film Theatre in the Detroit
Institute of Arts. $6.50-$7.50.
(313) 833-4005; tickets.dia.org .

October 20 2011

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