THE SOUL KEEPER (Roberto Faenza, 2002)

The same year as Elisabeth Márton’s extraordinary documentary My Name Was Sabina Spielrein a fictionalized treatment of Spielrein’s life, including her relationship with psychiatrist, later colleague Carl Jung, also surfaced. This is Italian filmmaker Roberto Faenza’s mostly English-language The Soul Keeper, whose script admits to seven different writers. One of the reasons for this high number of busy computers is that Faenza’s film is really two different films in rotation that by contrivance sort-of come together across time: one is about Spielrein and Jung; the other is about two persons in the present who are researching Spielrein and Jung. I concluded my entry on Márton’s documentary thusly: “Complex, fluid, kaleidoscopic, gorgeously backlit in (mostly) black and white, Márton’s mesmerizing film reclaims from obscurity Spielrein’s accomplished existence.” I have no such kind words for Faenza’s tedious soap opera. Those who wish to learn about Spielrein, and wish to be entertained in the bargain, should consult Márton’s film. Even where it isn’t pure confection and fabrication, Faenza’s film is superfluous and worthless.
     I like the one other film by Faenza that I have seen, Pereira Declares (Sostiene Pereira, 1996), from Antonio Tabucchi’s novel, about which I concluded: “Faenza’s film is far from perfect; it is often too busy visually, and the voiceover narration—whose it is is identified only at the end—creates a distracting aural overload. But the theme is urgent, and the film delivers two heart-walloping late punches.” This film is about an aging Lisboan newspaper editor, and his relationship with a young activist whom he employs, in politically contentious 1938. In his film about Spielrein, by contrast, Faenza seems lost.
     He engages here a wealth of fascinating material, but Faenza has made a stultifying film. What a chore to keep awake!

LETTERS FROM A DEAD MAN (Konstantin Lopushansky, 1986)

A computer error linked to the launch of a space shuttle has brought on nuclear winter, ending the world. In a shelter underneath a science museum and library survivors are either dying or desperately holding onto hope. The protagonist (played superbly by a barely recognizable Rolan Bykov) is a Nobel Laureate, in physics I believe, whose wife is dying. They and colleagues all go nameless (unless the English subtitles simply failed to identify characters) with a single exception: Eric, the couple’s son, to whom the father writes letter after letter, thereby keeping alive the hope that Eric, from whom he has heard nothing, is somewhere still alive. But without photographs to corroborate the existence of anyone outside the range of sight—these were destroyed in the nuclear holocaust—who knows if there ever was an Eric? Memory, after all, like anything human, is fallible. In time, the possibility strikes us that Eric is God.
     Written by Boris Strugatsky, Vyacheslav Rybakov and Tarkovsky disciple Konstantin Lopushansky, who directed, Pisma myortvogo cheloveka marshals pieces of the master’s visual signature: wet; remnants of past artifacts; slow pans. Lopushansky shifts between a rich form of sepia that includes glassiness, golden patches and occasional reddish tinge—the opening shot is of a hanging light bulb—and thin, gray and white. The film’s principal shortcoming is its want of tautness and cohesiveness. But for the most part this is a terrific piece of science fiction that culminates in an eerily beautiful finish that rescues an overwhelming sense of hope from the apocalyptic rubble. In a long-shot that reverses the direction of the chain of dead dancers passing into nothingness on the horizon at the end of Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal (1956), a group of sick children, perhaps accompanied by the spirit of the scientist, light out for the territories, perhaps passing into some sort of future. Thus they visually refute a remark made by one of the shelter’s inhabitants before he commits suicide in front of his grown son: “Mankind was a tragic species, doomed perhaps from the very beginning.”
     Let us hope that that is not the case.

THE SKY FALLS (Andreà and Antonio Frazzi, 2000)

Adapted by Suso Cecchi d’Amico from Lorenza Mazzetti’s autobiographical novel, Il cielo cade principally concerns Penny, the Lorenza-character, and her younger sister, here called Baby, who, orphaned when their parents are killed in a road accident, thus enter the home of an aunt and uncle, Katchen and Wilhelm, and the couple’s two daughters. Wilhelm is German and Jewish, a relation of Albert Einstein. Searching for Wilhelm, the SS storm the place—in the film, it is a Tuscan mansion—and slaughter the aunt and her two daughters, sparing Penny and Baby when the lead officer discovers the cross that Penny wears around her neck. When Wilhelm returns later that day, the sight of his murdered family drives him to commit suicide. In reality, Lorenza’s uncle committed suicide about a year later. Lorenza’s age, as well as Baby’s perhaps, has been reduced by six years, to ensure an innocent perspective. Penny is 9; Baby, 6.
     The unblemished kindness of the Einsteins is a future memory attuned to this past innocence. Deriding these family relations on any grounds would be as gratuitous now as were their fates at the hands of the Nazis. It would appear that Mazzetti, at least in Cecchi d’Amico’s version, is helpless in her capacity to remember much about her aunt and uncle; what she recalls are their warmth and kindness and her shattering loss of them unexpectedly one day—a loss that only compounds her loss of parents. Penny’s inability to recall her aunt and uncle with any precision becomes correlative to the couple’s loss of life, that is to say, the couple’s loss of the more of life they would have had under other circumstances.
     In such a circumstance, it is hard to know what about the film derives from whom: Mazzetti (herself a filmmaker, incidentally), Cecchi d’Amico, or the filmmakers, brothers Andreà and Antonio Frazzi. (The Frazzi twins, incidentally, were born the same year in which the action is set, 1944, in Florence, where Mazzetti also was born, in 1928.) But what most interests me about the film is something that happens in the background and around the edges, and sometimes makes a quick appearance at the center: the role of Catholicism. Penny’s father, we glean, was a Fascist and an anti-Semite, and Penny’s initial childish concern for the fate of her uncle’s soul mirrors her deceased father’s orientation. Meanwhile, the Tuscan priest who obsesses over these two new young girls is close to horrific in its parochial nature. Because of Wilhelm, he may feel, the other Einsteins lie outside his jurisdiction; as soon as he meets Penny, the ridiculous priest begins planning her confirmation! Gradually, by implication, the film draws the argument that the patriarchal Catholic Church primed Italy for its susceptibility to and obedience toward Fascism.
     Isabella Rossellini, acting for a change in her native language, plays Katchen beautifully, giving the best performance. There are moments, though, when she too closely resembles her mother. At such moments we think “Isabella” rather than “Katchen”—through no fault of Rossellini’s. It was up to the Frazzis to remedy this, that is, to stop doing what they were doing to make their star look like her late mother.

PRIMO LEVI’S JOURNEY (Davide Ferrario, 2006)

“I am in the [death] camp once more. There is no truth outside the camp. . . . We weren’t petrified by the slow snowing of days.” — Primo Levi

Davide Ferrario’s affecting documentary La strada di Levi retraces the circuitous, oft-“diverted” journey made by homeward-bound Primo Levi after the Jewish socialist was among those liberated from Auschwitz in January 1945. Eight months later Levi finally reached Turin, Italy: home. In the version I saw, there is voiceover, courtesy of Chris Cooper, of passages from Levi’s book The Truce, an account of his journey home from Auschwitz. But Ferrario’s film isn’t bound to the past; at each stop along the way locals speak into the camera, allowing us to compare Levi’s remarks about each place and later realities, there, to which these ordinary people give voice. They speak in a number of languages: Italian, Ukrainian, Russian, Romanian, Polish, Hungarian, Belarusian—and, of course, Cooper speaks English. We watch a crossing of the Danube; we dream ourselves into the present as well as into the past.
     Some things change, as a montage of Pacific Asian faces in a market in Budapest indicates; some things do not, as indicated by the woman in today’s Munich who insists that it is the future that matters, that she and her children share in no guilt for what the Nazis did. Not guilt, perhaps, but responsibility for the past, which (if a moral being) one takes, because by doing so the future is enhanced, is liberated, does matter.
     Another stop, though, devastated me. A Ukrainian man speaks of the 1986 disaster at Chernobyl, which brought illness to his months-old son in nearby Pripyat. But the boy was “lucky,” the father tells us, and we hold our breaths wondering if the man is being ironical. No, his son is alive, in Milan, having been shortly after “taken in” by a family that already had three children. The boy now is twenty; perhaps someday, the speaker muses, he will make it to Milan.
     Many believe that Levi’s death in 1987—from a fall from a third-floor apartment building landing—was a suicide. Elie Wiesel: “Primo Levi died at Auschwitz forty years earlier.”