Extremely dull and self-indulgent; forget seeing Romania
Written: Aug 23 '08
Product Rating:
Pros: Occasional interviews with local people, very occasional shots of Sighet streets
Cons: Dull, boring, self-absorbed, recycled 1930's Polish-Yiddish film footage, little to see
The Bottom Line: Fourth visit of Jewish Holocaust writer to his Romanian hometown in a very, very bad mood! Curious to see old Europe? Forget this film!
Anyone interested in Hungary and Romania would theoretically like to see this film. A more boring and self-indulgent film about a trip back home I've never seen. Elie Wiesel, a well-known writer about the European Jewish persecution, goes back to the town of Sighet, now in Romania, used to be Hungary until 1940. He was a very serious, bookish son in a family of four children, whose entire family vanished with shipment to Auschwitz in 1944. His parents were Orthodox Jews, living in the stetl part of Sighet, close to the USSR border and Hungarian border. This was his fourth journey back, with a film crew, to walk again his childhood streets.
Firstly, the quality of the filming and editing is primitive: many minutes of clouds, or simply Wiesel's face looking out a bus or plane window, fill the screen. We cannot see the town at all as we consider his sincere melancholy. The few long-range shots of empty streets are faded in color, clearly from the 1970's, from another visit he made. The modern shots show only a few very old Romanian people, whom he is interrogating. He is demanding in a dark Naderish way about the Fisch family, where they had lived, and what their first names had been. The elderly poor neighbors give straight and honest answers, which refer to the wrong Fisch family, and which seems to really infuriate Wiesel, until a Jewish U.S. friend with him reassures him, "They were maybe cousins". I began to wonder what type of character this Mr. Wiesel was, to treat the people of his hometown in such a manner. Surely he did not expect good results? I understand he is an esteemed professor: does he treat students and staff in the same manner? Good Lord!
Meanwhile, although I began to fast-forward through the monotony of his self-absorbed monologue (William Hurt is speaking), I kept waiting for modern street scenes of his beloved stetl. Why no information of the daily life there now, the people, the streets, shops, houses, etc. etc.? We are given one fleeting glimpse of a very sad funeral, with all the local participants walking through the depressed, empty, poverty-stricken street, then suddenly - cut! The camera simply goes into a house where Wiesel and his US friends stand around and pick at broken parts.
Old black/white footage of the Jewish life is interspliced, but much of it appears to have come from Poland, because I have seen it before, or from the DVD by George Stevens, "D-Day to Berlin". Why include all this extraneous and oft-repeated material? Why show all the speechmaking back in the USA, when we were promised a trip to his hometown?
I suggest, for all those familiar to Eliezer Wiesel's writings, who have a true curiosity as to his family's origins and lifestyle, to simply google "SIghet Romania". The beauty of the wooden architecture and the mountains surrounding the town are stunning. The festivals and folk costumes are gorgeous. None of this is shown in his film, except when driving back at the end of the film, through the rocky and snowy empty roads.
A viewer gets NO sense of this Romanian/Hungarian Jew's origins. As for languages, the various old survivors seem multi-lingual: they're speaking in Romanian, Hungarian, German, Yiddish and English. The ones who remained, who returned to their town Sighet, who endured Communist occupation and extreme hardship, seem much less upset than Elie Wiesel. The elderly women happily play the servants to the old Jewish men, never complaining (on film) as they go back and forth serving. Wouldn't these women like to sit with him and speak? WHy all the focus only on men? Why was his education so exclusively for boys? Does he not dwell on any present-day injustices or visible poverty?
VERY DISAPPOINTING! If you don't know this man, and want to keep a positive view, don't see this DVD.
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