How Holocaust-era film The Shop on the High Street frames fascism

I have finally met a Taika Waititi film I didn’t like. A lot is unsettling about the intense cutesification of Nazism in his latest, Jojo Rabbit, about a 10-year-old German boy who is entranced by Hitler’s hateful ideology until friendship with a Jewish girl makes him question it during the last years of World War II. The parts of the film which attempt to be irreverent don’t sit convincingly with the parts that attempt to be profound. They are vaguely held together by Rilke quotes and formularised montages set to German versions of classic hits, making for glib satire and mawkish drama.

The filmmaker of Mâori and Jewish origins won an Oscar for this screen adaptation of Christine Leunens’s novel Caging Skies but he did his best work before arriving in Hollywood. A far richer inspection of how male role models can disappoint (and how female ones can be quietly heroic) is the New Zealand Film Commission-produced Boy (2010) — dealing with childhood abandonment and wonderment in an indigenous New Zealand town in the Michael Jackson-obsessed nineties. But this isn’t a column detailing the failings of Jojo Rabbit. There is enough required reading on that matter: Esther Rosenfield, Peter Bradshaw, Caspar Salmon.

I take the opportunity instead to write about another Holocaust-era film. The Shop on the High Street from Czechoslovakia, which won the Academy Award for best foreign film in 1965, is an example of both necessary and great filmmaking. Directors Jan Kadar and Elmar Klos set their human story in the midst of a Nazi-backed programme in a small Slovak town, where “Aryan controllers” were assigned charge of Jewish businesses.

A still from The Shop on the High Street

 

One such unwitting “Arisator” is the protagonist, carpenter Tono (Jozef Kroner in the performance of a lifetime), whose corrupt brother-in-law, a soldier “as fat as a bishop”, has planned for him to appropriate the button shop of an elderly widow, Rozalia Lautmann (the unsurpassable Ida Kaminski). Tono, although talked into it by his wife, is not entirely motivated to enter the needlecrafts business, and Rozalia is stubbornly oblivious to the hatred filling her hometown.

The two’s initial struggle to communicate is tellingly humorous. Rozalia is deaf and in the process of repeatedly explaining “Aryanisation” to her, Tono himself cannot escape how unsound the law really is. The locals convince him to reach a different settlement: they pay him to let her continue running the shop. A sweet friendship forms between the two where she fixes him hearty meals and he ardently polishes all the furniture.

There are two particularly aggravating scenarios in the movie. A 15-minute depiction of a dinner — which has as much tension built into it as the new Safdie brothers thriller Uncut Gems — in the course of which the brother-in-law feeds and waters Tono while pitching the fascist opportunity to him. By the end of this, the modest carpenter, mildly tempted and wholly inebriated, holds a tiny black comb across his upperlip and climbs up on a chair speaking avid gibberish. He has enlisted to the mockworthy cause. 

Then, in the film’s last half hour, while the town’s Jewish population is being sent to a concentration camp, Tono is torn between saving his friend and protecting himself. Rozalia won’t go into hiding nor leave her shop, and he is afraid of the consequences that await him if they are discovered. The question, as Kenneth Tynan summed up beautifully in his review, is: “How much of a man belongs to authority and how much to himself? At what point must the individual say ‘No’?”

A surreal happy ending and a final tragic one coexist in The Shop on the High Street, which benefits from intellectual honesty and thoughtfully edited frames. An excellent Blu-ray rendering of the film was released by UK-based DVD makers Second Run. There are few films that do better in showing why, during murderous periods, indecisiveness can be the same as collusion.

ranjita.ganesan@bsmail.in