Sacramento — The deliciously ironic Czech film “Divided We Fall” revolves around a married couple who hides a Jew during the Nazi occupation of Eastern Europe. In a refreshing and utterly unpredictable variation on the genre, the film views events from the perspective of the gentile couple.
As such, “Divided We Fall” isn’t a cliched indictment of man’s inhumanity to man so much as a painfully funny exploration of the wartime paranoia that sets friends against neighbors, employees against former bosses and everybody against collaborators.
The movie is populated neither by heroes nor villains, but by ordinary, flawed people. A complex and mature view of life under occupation, “Divided We Fall” could only have been made from the distance of half a century.
The film, which was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Film, opens Friday, July 6 at Landmark’s Oriental Theatre.
When “Divided We Fall” opens in 1937, Horst and Josef work for Mr. Weiner, a middle-aged Jewish businessman. Fast forward a few years and the Weiner clan is evicted from its villa, then shipped to Theresienstadt a few years later.
Weiner’s adult son, David, escapes from the camp in 1943 and returns to his hometown, where he chances to meet Josef. After their close call with an SS officer, Josef is compelled to conceal his former employer’s son.
Although it’s the moral thing to do, Josef’s crucial action seems to take place in a moment of weakness. He doesn’t choose to hide David so much as succumb to the overwhelming fear of sending him away to almost certain capture and death.
Josef and his wife, Marie, set up David in the pantry, a small room where a contraband pig has been hung up to dry. When the couple is alone at their dining room table, the pig ludicrously stretched out between them, Josef laments what has befallen him.
“Could I have imagined I’d be left out of all this? We watched from the window and told ourselves it was just passing by. Today it’s after us.”
While this is hardly the inspirational talk of a hero, it does convey the ambivalence of people caught up in forces beyond their control. Just as David is confined to a tiny room, all the Czechs are prisoners in their own country.
Remarkably, this is just the beginning of Josef and Marie’s bizarre tale, which is supposedly based on a true story.
Josef’s annoying former co-worker, Horst, is a regular visitor. Isolated because he works for the Nazis and desperate for friendship, he brings sausages and medicine and flirts with Marie.
Horst also smells the couple’s secret, and the film deftly marks him as the one most likely to rat them out to the SS. When he forces Marie to take a drive and have a drink with him, then makes a sleazy pass at her, his wickedness is confirmed.
But there’s still a long way to go in “Divided We Fall,” and nobody’s fate is guaranteed. Suffice it to say that Josef’s longstanding opposition to children, and his physical inability to father one, is transformed by his and Marie’s “adoption” of David.
As its title suggests, “Divided We Fall” is a vibrant fable about the folly of letting prejudice, rumor and jealousy destroy a community. The film cogently speaks to the recent conflicts in Eastern Europe, even as it evokes the gentle 1960s political satires of Czech filmmakers Jiri Menzel and Milos Forman.
This article first appeared in the Jewish Bulletin of Northern California.
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