FILM REVIEW – THE BOY IN
THE STRIPED PYJAMAS 2008.
A powerful, often harrowing film about the Holocaust, which is all the more remarkable for being about and possibly for children as well as adults. The film startles and ultimately shocks for its uncompromising and relentless rush to a dreadful tragedy. It made me wonder at what age parents start to relate to their children the nature and back-story to the Holocaust and other human crimes against humanity, and the darker sides of our behaviour. Perhaps some leave it to the schools to do this.
In the film, David Thwellis becomes the new Commandant of a Concentration camp he refers to as Out With (which may or may not be Auschwitz. It has four crematoria and Auschwitz alone had that many.
Moving to a luxury house just outside the camp with his family, Thwellis leads a decadent life, he largely shields his young son, Bruno (aged 8) from the true nature of the war and the nature of the camp, which Bruno assumes is a farm.
Unknown to his family, the lonely Bruno finds an unguarded corner of the camp, and befriends a Jewish inmate, a boy of his own age, called Shmuel, and smuggles food to him, an act he denies in front of his friend when the boy is caught with some.
Bruno and his sister are slowly being fed Nazi propaganda about the nature of Jews, which the older sister believes and acts on, while Bruno, having met Shmuel, dismisses much of this as nonsense.
A propaganda film has been made in the camp, showing the Jews as happy campers, and being well treated. Bruno secretly watches it as the Nazis watch it openly, and finds himself confused due to some stories he hears from Shmuel.
His family sense that Bruno is distressed by the family’s involvement in the camp activity and decide to move him to stay with distant relatives. On the last day in the camp, Bruno sneaks out and sets about re-befriending Shmuel, Bruno hears that the boys parents have vanished without trace, and disguising himself in a cap, and striped pyjamas he breaks in to the camp to help Shmuel find them. He arrives just in time to be caught up with Shmuel in the latest cull, and finds himself herded with the Jews into the showers, stripped, and gassed. His family discover his course of action and rush to save him, but they are too late. The final shot is the family grieving for their own German son in a room full of the discarded pyjamas of hundreds of Jews who perished with him. The film credits role with no further comment necessary.
The film has its flaws. Very few children that young were allowed to live in the Concentration Camps. A few were kept alive for curiosity value, but most were separated from their families and exterminated on arrival. Also, Bruno is told that there are only Jews in the camp regarded as enemies, which ignores the number of gypsies, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Homosexuals, and many others similarly murdered and incarcerated.
Bruno, once stripped for the shower, should have obviously come across as none Jewish, as he still has hair (even if no one notices he is uncircumcised). The film was partly criticised for having the children filmed amidst many naked adults being pressed in to the shower block, but given the historic context that seems perfectly reasonable.
Thwellis is superb in balancing caring father with the nature and love of his work, with his son getting chilling insights into his dad’s behaviour but never fully understanding the true nature of what is going on until it is too late.
Great performances throughout and the most devastating of endings for a film about children ever, but ending positively was never going to be an option here.
© Copyright. Arthur Chappell
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