Producers: Melissa Parmenter, Josh Hyams, Luigi Napoleone and Massimo Di Rocco Director: Michael Winterbottom Screenplay: Michael Winterbottom, Laurence Coriat and Paul Viragh Cast: Irina Starshenbaum, Harry Melling, Douglas Booth, Gal Mizrav, Ian Hart, Aury Alby, Ofer Seker, Liudmyla Vasylieva, Aliosha Massine, Oliver Chris, Doron Kochavi, Yotam Ishay, Tim Wallers, Bouchaib Chtiwi, Otto Hills-Fletcher, Rony Herman and Ariel Nil Levy Distributor: Greenwich Entertainment
Grade: C+
The historical background is treated with far greater effectiveness than the personal story set against it in Michael Winterbottom’s period thriller, a well-groomed but strangely detached tale of the romance between a British official and a Jewish reporter in late 1930s-early 1940s Palestine.
As the film is painfully dedicated to pointing out through expository narration and archival news footage, it was a troubled and violent time in the region. The British had been granted a mandate over the territory in 1922, and dealt sternly with the restive Arab population, which frequently rioted and moved into open rebellion in the mid-1930s as Jewish immigration, driven by Zionist thought and the rise of Hitler, surged. They treated the Jewish paramilitary, the Haganah, which had existed since 1920, less harshly, though they took more direct action against its more militant offshoot, the Irgun, which began operations in 1931. When the Arab uprising was suppressed by 1938, they decided on a more even-handed policy targeting Jewish paramilitaries as well as Arab rebels. The Irgun grew more violent in its tactics, especially the offshoot called Lehi, directed after 1940 by Avraham Stern, which undertook a campaign of robbery, bombing and targeted assassination against the British, whom they saw as a colonial oppressor despite the UK’s nominal support, enunciated since 1917, for the establishment of a Jewish homeland in Palestine. The situation worsened further when Stern rejected Haganah’s decision to support the British against Nazi Germany; he encouraged his followers to continue their violence against the British occupiers.
It’s against this roiling political backdrop that Winterbottom focuses on the romance between Shoshana Borochov (Irina Starshenbaum), a Jewish reporter and Haganah supporter (indeed, the daughter of a major figure in the Zionist movement), and Tom Wilkin (Douglas Booth), a British official whose sympathies with Zionist aspirations and moderate manner had led him even to master Hebrew, and not merely for use in interrogation. Their relationship includes some passionate lovemaking, which the director presents in scenes that are supposed to be smoldering. But while Starshenbaum brings the requisite fiery edge to her character, Booth is all mild British reserve as Wilkin, who as depicted here is a punctilious but dull lover—and a man who can barely muster irritation, let alone anger, over his country’s increasingly severe polices.
Those involve his having to serve as the lieutenant to Geoffrey Morton (reliably hissable Harry Melling), a rigid colonel placed in charge of dealing with what was seen as Jewish terrorism, who resorted to methods—including waterboarding in interrogations—that Wilkin is clearly unsettled by. Despite the assassination of informants and policemen (and, eventually, threats against his wife, a naively optimistic teacher played by Gina Bramhill), Morton is relentless in pursuit of Stern (Aury Alby), whom he finally tracks to a Tel Aviv apartment in 1942. What happened there is a matter of dispute—Stern was shot to death, but whether it was while trying to escape (Morton’s version) or simple murder remains a matter of debate.
What’s clear is that Wilkin’s presence at the incident, though he was not in the room when the shooting occurred, led Lehi to target him for assassination in 1944. Shashona attends his funeral—one of many depicted in the course of the film—before striding off through a trail between the trees, ignoring the condolences of the British commissioner (Ian Hart) under whom Wilkin had served –a scene that film connoisseurs will surely recognize as a homage to the scathing close of Carol Reed’s “The Third Man” (1949), though done here without the famous zither music. (David Holmes’s score is nowhere near as memorable.)
If the central romance is rather tepidly portrayed, Winterbottom injects genuine excitement into the historical context. The accuracy of the relationship between Morton and Wilkin might be doubted, as it reflects the good German-bad German topos that’s become a commonplace in World War II films, and the cast of supporting characters among police and insurgents is so large that except for the main players (Alby’s Stern, particularly) it’s difficult to keep the players straight in the midst of all the explosions, assassinations and sequences of debate and argument among the adherents of different factions. The film does manage to keep the overall arc fairly clear, however, and the muddle is, after all, part of the reality of the time.
The film does, moreover, convey a sense of visual authenticity, with the city of Ostuni in southern Italy standing in credibly for mid-nineteenth century Tel Aviv and Sergo Tribastone’s production design and the costumes by Anthony Unwin and Giada Tricomi unobtrusively reflecting the period. So does the use of popular songs to capture the flavor of the time, with the Gershwins’ “The Man I Love” as a recurrent motif an appropriate choice. Giles Nuttgens’ cinematography has the rough-edged style Winterbottom favors, and Marc Richardson’s editing integrates the romantic and action elements decently while keeping the complicated action fairly clear.
Although Winterbottom avoids drawing comparisons between the events of “Shashona” and the present day, “Shoshana” inevitably reminds us that the state of Israel was born in terrorism. It’s a sobering reality that after nearly a century the violence of that time remains endemic in Palestine now.