QUICK SNAP: LIVE FROM TALLINN
Director Klaus Härö’s new film dramatises the efforts of the Finnish Jew Abraham Stiller (Ville Virtanen) to prevent Finnish authorities from handing over immigrant Jews to the Gestapo (a first step that would surely escalate and endanger all Finnish Jews). It shares a little with Schindler’s List (Steven Spielberg, 1993) the holocaust-prevention sub-genre’s standard bearer (a much more Zionist film than Never Alone), but it really has more in common with last year’s One Life (James Hawes). Like One Life, Never Alone frames itself from the historical “present” (which isn’t necessarily our present) and moves back and forth across time through the recollection of the life-saving and genocide-fighting hero. In the “present” of both films, others force the hesitant protagonists to recollect their great deeds – a framing that allows them to remain humble and worth celebrating while they remain in perpetual mourning for the souls they failed to save.
Härö makes an interesting directorial choice by shooting the present in black and white and the past in colour. Instead of the past feeling distanced through its inability to achieve colour, the present does. The scenes in the present are admittedly thin, and a film of just 85 minutes. This limits its to reverberate into our present crises. Härö approaches a profound observation through this stylistic choice and never fully embraces it in the screenplay’s short time spent with Stiller in his elderly years: Heroism of this sort is now a relic of our past.
For a film topically about the Shoah, there is very little violence. Not that every good film about the greatest human tragedy to ever happen needs be violent – The Zone of Interest (Jonathan Glazer, 2023) is a great counter-example — but, for the most part, a complete absence of violence more or less is tantamount to an absence of the human cost of genocide. There is a dearth violence of in Never Alone. The little that is present comes at the cost of Abraham’s person, the hero, rather than the victims. Abraham being a Jew, rather than the good-goy is a new development in the sub-genre even if he is still more privileged at the time as a non-immigrant. While the audience surely knows about the Nazi promise of violence, removing its presentation from the equation makes the experience palatable. Never Alone sugarcoats the Shoah. To same victims, that could be an affront.
The best scene in the film has to be when Abraham, a free man with a travel visa, celebrates Shabbat with his fellow Jews, imprisoned by the Finnish government and sent to Lapland for work, in front of the Gestapo. The long shot of Abraham, “The Wandering Jew”, in the field with the labourers in the distant background creates a visual chasm for him to cross. Once he crosses it, the victims become our friends too – in close-ups and also in extreme close-ups (on their rugged hands). Now the Gestapo make up the small othered figures in the background. He follows their orders to come to them and has an intense and stressful talk with them before returning to his kin, against their wishes but with the security of a piece of paper he presents them. Their Hebrew songs defiantly grate against the slaughter of their anti-semitic counterparts. It’s not a perfect scene – the passing of the gloves was a bit melodramatic, and it’s difficult not to question whether or not Abraham endangers the others more than he helps them – but it is certainly a good one.
The biggest problem with Never Alone is its infantile vilification of the villains. The white supremacists in Never Alone look nothing like the average citizen. They are monstrous men (always men) with no shred of faux decency about their gait. They offer their hands and quickly retract upon learning the Jewish name of their would-be handshake partner. They have terrifying facial scars that make their physical appearance as “monstrous” as their bigotry. (There is, of course, another issue created by using physical abnormalities in an attempt to repulse viewers.) By dehumanising and distancing these right-wing personalities, Never Alone caricatures fascistic tendencies into unrecognisable despotism. In reality, Nazis walk amongst us. They take their kids to the same soccer practices. They buy the same food at the grocery stores. They even share meals with us.
Never Alone just premiered in the Baltic Competition of the 28th Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival.
