Cinema
Triumph of the Spirit ('18', Odeon Leicester Square) Music Box (`15', Odeon Haymarket)
Silence is best
Hilary Mantel
Until I saw the first of these films I had no opinion on whether the Holocaust could or should be the subject of a popular film. But now I hope that Triumph of the Spirit will be the last attempt to mass-market the topic. Not that the film is cynical — far from it. It is transparently pure in motive. But as drama it is doleful; and it is offensive in all sorts of unexpected ways.
It is based on a true story. Willem Dafoe plays the boxer Salamo Arouch, a Balkan middleweight champion. After the Ger-
man occupation of Thessalonika he and his family were sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau. He fought bouts for the entertainment of SS officers and thus survived, although his family died.
Robert Young's film reconstructs in a painstaking, pedestrian and achingly taste- ful way the routine of life and death in the camps. We do not enter the mind of the hero, simply observe him. His course of action seems necessary, and even honour- able in its way, since by exercising his trade he can show that he is a man, not a dog fighting for food or a mule to bear loads. But is his survival really a triumph of the spirit, or a triumph of the flesh? Is survival the highest good, the only good? The interesting questions are not addressed. The film seems designed to educate those who know nothing of the events it por- trays. Those who know something will constantly think of what cannot be shown, and wonder if, now that survivors' testi- mony is on record, this part of European history should be veiled in the decency (and subtlety) of print.
What offends is a crude, overwhelming and obvious musical score; it is as if emotion needs to be wrung from the audience, as if we wouldn't know what to feel unless cattle-prodded by a violin bow. Then there is the desperately sincere voice- over that tops and tails the film; its actorish banality grates on the senses, and its well-used sentiments patronise the viewer. There are some subjects for which you have to find special words: if you can't, silence is best.
Costa-Gavras's Music Box approaches the issue indirectly; this is the wiser course, though I am not sure that the result is happier. Mike Lazio (Armin Mueller Stahl) has held American citizenship for 37 years; a retired steelworker, he is a pillar of the Illinois Hungarian community. He finds himself under investigation; the Hungarian government want him extra- dited to stand trial for atrocities committed when — as they allege — he was a member of a fascist group called the Arrow Cross.
Is it a case of mistaken identity? To defend him, the guilty-looking old cove chooses his all-American daughter, Ann Talbot, a Chicago criminal lawyer. This sounds like a bad idea, and it is. Talbot (Jessica Lange) has to withstand several shocks as the details of Poppa's past come out. She giggles a good deal and shakes her sweet head like a skittish filly, and giggles and jibs more; you have never seen a lawyer like it. Her method may conduce to career success under the American system; she wouldn't impress at the Middle Tem- ple. Soon, as the going gets tougher, she is frowning between giggles, and abstractedly pouring drinks from empty bottles, and asking Poppa, 'Why did we never have any Jewish friends?'
By the time the complexities of the situation are presented, it is too late for the film. The clues are dropped like lumps of lead: when Poppa is teaching his grandson to do push-ups and giving him a spiel about healthy minds in healthy bodies, you some- how just know that he didn't get his sentiments from Juvenal's Satires or the Jane Fonda Work-out tape. A difficult, contentious issue needs a more thoughtful treatment than this.
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