Financial Times (London,England)

May 14, 1992, Thursday

When Hitler Youth paid off

By STEPHEN AMIDON

EUROPA, EUROPA (15) Odeon Kensington, Screen on the Hill

THE DARK WIND (15) MGMs West End

MEMOIRS OF AN INVISIBLE MAN (PG) MGMs West End

SCORCHERS (18) Odeon Haymarket

It would be hard to believe the events depicted in Europa, Europa if it were not for the fact that they are based on a true story. Polish director Agnieszka Holland’s powerful film tells the tale of Solomon Perel, a German Jewish boy who survives the Holocaust by passing himself off as a Hitler Youth. Perel (played with near perfect credibility by Marco Hofschneider) is 13 when his family is forced to flee from Berlin to Poland after his sister is beaten to death by Nazis. When war breaks out, he flees further east, winding up in a Russian orphanage, where he gets a crash course in saving his skin by allowing himself to be indoctrinated by the Bolsheviks. After Hitler attacks the Soviet Union, Perel is once again forced to switch allegiances upon being captured by an SS unit. By virtue of quick thinking and sheer luck he becomes a celebrated German soldier, earning himself a place at the elite school for Hitler Youth. There, he must somehow hide his identity from his classmates, even going so far as to try to uncircumcise his penis in a crude and nearly fatal auto-operation. It is only with the defeat of the Nazis and a miraculous reunion with his last surviving family member that he can reveal his true self. Holland steers us through this difficult story with a surprisingly deft touch, balancing its true horror with darkly humorous sequences, such as the moment when Perel is credited with capturing a Russian squad after trying to surrender to them. There is something ironically apt about the fact that it is his penis that constantly threatens to give him a way, as if the Jewish manliness his forefathers bequeathed him is the one thing he cannot betray. In the end, it is what saves him from going over altogether to the enemy, represented most potently by the pretty young madchen who offers herself to him in order that they can make a little Aryan bundle for Adolph. The film is by no means flawless – the sequences in which Perel dreams of a dancing Stalin and a secretly Jewish Hitler seem flat and contrived. In the end, however, Holland has fashioned a subtle and provocative film, made even more impressive by the director’s refusal to moralise on Perel’s story. Though free will plays just as big a part in the boy’s survival as fate, one is never asked to see him as either a hero or a traitor. Hofschneider’s remarkable performance exorcises all traces of calculation and cunning from the young hero. He is a pawn of history who somehow manages to avoid capture. Perel gains nothing from his deception except his life, and, by doing so, manages to score a victory, however dubious, over those who would have taken it from him. The Dark Wind is Hollywood’s first attempt to bring to the screen one of Tony Hillerman’s superb detective novels, noted not just for their skill and integrity but also for their unique setting – the Indian Country of America’s Southwest. Hillerman’s sleuth is Officer Jim Chee of the Navajo Tribal Police (played here by Lou Diamond Phillips), a detective who balances his interest in police work with a desire to master the ‘old ways’ of his people’s culture and religion. Here, Chee finds himself assigned to a seemingly routine stakeout, only to be drawn into a complex tale of murder, witchcraft and drug smuggling. To make matters worse, he soon becomes a suspect in the case, pursued by malevolent Federal agents as well as the real killer. Despite the promising and timely material, however, the film gets entangled in the undergrowth of its own complexity. This is not to say that there are not good things at work here, most notably Phillips’s performance, which manages to show how the qualities that make Chee a good Navajo – patience, acuity, respect – also make him an effective cop, a man who is able to feel the dark wind of crime that blows among his people. And the film makers deserve full marks for their unsentimental presentation of the traditions of the Navajo people. The problem is the direction of Errol Morris, a celebrated documentary maker whose most famous film, The Thin Blue Line, was a painstaking examination of a real life crime for which the wrong man had been imprisoned. Unfortunately, Morris’s characteristic deliberation and exhaustive thirst for facts bog down this fictional detective story. All too often, he misses the desert for the cactuses, providing slogging exposition at just the moments he should be jolting the viewer along. It is a style that is too detailed to make for gripping drama. The result is a movie as bloodless as a corpse left too long in the sun. Memoirs of an Invisible Man is another film that suffers from a lack of flesh and blood. In it, a strangely subdued Chevy Chase plays a callow stockbroker who manages to get himself zapped by an experimental ray that makes him invisible. Far from providing the voyeuristic satisfaction such a condition might seem to promise, this transfiguration brings him nothing but trouble, primarily in the form of a wicked CIA agent (Sam Neill) who wants to recruit Chase for his obvious espionage advantages. Director John Carpenter seems to have given up on the sci-fi and thriller aspects of the film altogether, straining credibility from start to finish with a series of illogical leaps. Instead, he focuses on special effects and sightless gags, resulting in a few nice touches, such as the transparent Chase chewing gum or inhaling cigarette smoke. But the overall feeling the film leaves you with is one of missed opportunities – when Chase finally beds the woman of his dreams (Daryl Hannah), we are given no sense of the pros and cons of invisibility in the sack. The whole thing ends up being a rather perfunctory rehashing of Carpenter’s far superior Starman. Indeed, the film’s most convincing display of invisibility comes from Hannah herself, who proves yet again that her acting ability cannot be detected by the human eye. A little bit of on-screen invisibility would have come in handy during Scorchers. Set on a summer’s night in backwoods Louisiana, the movie intertwines two separate stories of innocence and lust, one involving a young bride who hides under the bed from her earnest young husband, the second depicting another youthful wife as she goes gunning for her man and the prostitute he has been frequenting. For good measure, there is also a nearly incomprehensible sub-plot about two feuding old codgers who end up dancing to Mahler around a jukebox (don’t ask). Writer/director David Beaird seems to be operating under the fallacious assumption that if he throws in equal measures of crudity and sentimentality then he will come up with something that is neither. The result is an abrasive, gooey film that manages to make you wonder what Beaird expects the audience to feel. Veteran cast members Faye Dunaway (as the good-hearted whore), James Earl Jones (splenetic bartender) and Denholm Elliott (town drunk) seemed to have realised that something was amiss here, each turning in performances so loaded with self-parody that you can forgive them their presence in so misguided a production.