The Art of the Fugitive

By JONATHAN RICHARDS

Fugitive Pieces, Holocaust memories, rated R, in English, German, Yiddish, and Greek with subtitles, CCA Cinematheque, 982-1338, 3 chiles

Jakob (Stephen Dillane) is young, handsome, and brilliant. He’s a successful Canadian writer and respected academic. He has beautiful, sexy wife who adores him. What could be so bad?

Memories. He’s haunted by them. As a 9-year-old in wartime Poland, he watched, horrified, from hiding as his parents were brutally murdered and his teenage sister abducted by Nazi soldiers. His own escape was harrowing: after running pell-mell through the woods, he frantically dug a shallow grave and buried himself under dirt and leaves to sleep with only his head exposed.

In a miraculous stroke of luck, his hiding place turned out to be yards from an archaeological dig, and his exposed head was spotted in the morning by Athos (Rade Sherbedgia), the leader of the expedition and a man of surpassing courage and goodness. Athos risked his own life to smuggle the boy out of Poland and back to his native Greece, where the two lived out the rest of the war warily avoiding the periodic Nazi death squads hunting down Jews.

After the war, Athos got an offer to teach in a Canadian university, and it is there that Jakob has grown to manhood, wrestling with his demons most of his waking hours. When he meets the beautiful, irrepressible Alex (Rosamund Pike), it seems her joie de vivre may be able to lift him from his moody preoccupation with the horrors of his past. Jakob and Alex do all the right things — they run laughing through the rain, share intimate dinners, and talk politics and philosophy with her bohemian friends. But there may be a hint of problems to come when she gets a fit of giggles during their first lovemaking and twits him for being so serious.

After Athos dies, Jakob sinks deeper into his obsession, and when Alex finds a page in her husband’s journal suggesting that she is a drag on his pursuit of what he calls “harvesting darkness,” the marriage is over. Just as well, for as Jakob writes in that journal, “to live with ghosts requires solitude.”

The film was adapted by writer-director Jeremy Podeswa from the much-honored 1996 debut novel by Canadian writer Anne Michaels. The director’s father is a Holocaust survivor, and Podeswa approaches the material with a heaviness of spirit that matches Jakob’s. Podeswa employs a layering of flashbacks, toggling between three basic time frames: the present (set in the late ’70s) in Toronto and Greece; the trauma of that terrible day in Poland in 1942; and Jakob’s boyhood time of recovery and healing with Athos, in Greece and Toronto during the war and its aftermath. This format can be disorienting, especially when a flashback triggers another flashback. But gradually the movie finds its footing, thanks in good part to the richness of its performances.

Dillane (Thomas Jefferson in HBO’s John Adams) carries off the toughest job in the movie, working to inhabit the depressive Jakob with enough nuance to hold our interest even as he slogs through the enveloping darkness of his memories and his impossible search for signs that his sister may have survived. That Dillane succeeds as well as he does is remarkable. He’s buttressed by a beautiful performance by Robbie Kay, who plays the young Jakob with the wary alertness of a forest creature. Rosamund Pike, seen recently as Jane in the Keira Knightley Pride and Prejudice, makes sure Alex doesn’t get buried in superficiality; not being as serious and haunted as Jakob doesn’t necessarily make you an airhead.

The great Serbian actor Sherbedgia gives Fugitive Pieces its heart. Athos does not get a lot to say, and when he does it’s often in aphorisms. One of his favorites is “The great mystery of wood is not that it burns, but that it grows.” But his unspoken loving humanity is what saves this picture from burying itself in the quicksand of its tortured recollections. “I long for the loss of memory,” Jakob writes in his journal, and there are times when you would do almost anything to help.

When Athos dies, it’s as big a loss to us as to Jakob. “You must be buried in ground that will remember you,” the older man once told his foster son, and Jakob, figuring that three decades in Canada isn’t enough for that young country’s attention span, returns with the ashes and his memories to the Greek Islands, which lightens the movie’s palette.

This is a story with a lot of currents, and as it goes on, they swirl together to form a stream that gathers strength. The brutality of the Nazi occupying force is a theme that demands attention in a world in which invasion and occupation have not altogether vanished; is this kind of invader mentality a German thing, or a human byproduct of institutionalized violence? Music is another theme; the fugitive of the title shares Latin roots with the word fugue, a term that applies to the film’s structure in both its musical and psychiatric senses.

I have not read Anne Michaels’ book, but the movie’s ending has apparently been brightened since its showing at the 2007 Toronto International Film Festival, in order to send audiences home mollified, if not exactly humming fugues.

(c) 2008 The Santa Fe New Mexican. Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning. All rights Reserved.