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Alex, played by Rosamund Pike, |
War and pieces as boy sees massacre
FUGITIVE PIECES
Directed by Jeremy Podeswa
Certificate 15
THE doors crash open, gunshots ring out.
We cannot quite see what is happening, but the noise tells us what we need to know.
Our view is at knee level: folk are dragged outside, and more shots are fired. From a cavity behind a wall, a young boy watches his family murdered one by one by Nazi soldiers – and we witness a crucial moment in a person’s life that will dictate his behaviour for decades after.
Fugitive Pieces is a carefully made and slow-burning film that tells the story of Jakob, a Polish Jew who witnesses his village as it is massacred. He flees into forests where he is found, bedraggled, by Athos, a large, lonely Greek archaeologist.
The pair escape to his idyllic Greek island where they sit out the war, coming to terms with their personal losses set against the global tragedy playing out across the seas.
Time passes: they move to Canada, where Athos teaches and Jakob tries to write his memories down as the past, and the haunting ideas of what happened to his sister, Bella, continually confronts him.
Director Jeremy Podeswa took the story from a 1996 novel and has brought it carefully to life. While trying to cover some majorly complex issues – the film is about memory, history and the redemptive power of love – he has done so with a lightness that means not only do you fall for the characters, you don’t get bogged down in morosely thoughtful scenes.
At first, I feared minor wobbles would make this a drag. I found it hard to do the maths, and place Jakob in the correct decade: the period where our hero is a young man seemed at first to be set in the present, which of course does not tally with the childhood experiences that form the bedrock of this story.
I was partly thrown by Jakob’s first wife Alex (Rosamund Pike), who appears in a variety of non-period outfits. She flounces and is frivolous, hardly a demanding role for someone of Pike’s abilities, and she fulfils her dippy directions breezily. But this is not a breezy film, and Pike soon slips off, having failed to blow away the gloomy clouds lingering above Jakob.
It is a wonderful performance from Stephen Dillane as Jakob. He is due to pop up in Channel Four’s film about Tufnell Park photographer Tom Hurndall, and has proven himself as an interesting actor with an eye for measured performances. |
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