LONDON GUARDIAN

Peter Bradshaw

Friday July 12, 2002

Sixty years on and the second world war, so very far from receding into the collective unconscious, seems more vivid and real than it has ever been. Books pour off the presses, conservative and revisionist, most recently Antony Beevor's research indicting Russian troops' mass rape of German women. Always, the Holocaust is a vital part of this scholarly activity: the war's ultimate moral centre of debate.

In the cinema, there is an almost equal interest. In May, the Cannes Palme d'Or was awarded to Roman Polanski's The Pianist, about the Nazi genocide. Now Constantin Costa-Gavras has brought his distinctive passion for exposing state complicity and corruption to the subject, by adapting Rolf Hochhuth's play Der Stellvertreter, or The Representative, about the silence of the Vatican and Pope Pius XII about the mass extermination of Jews.

Costa-Gavras and Hochhuth in many ways make a good fit. Both are given to asking tactless and provocative questions about the culpability of state agents who consider themselves, and are considered, to be blameless. (Most controversially, Hochhuth's work The Soldiers accused Winston Churchill of being an assassin.) Costa-Gavras's films State of Siege (1973) and Missing (1982) dramatise United States involvement in repressive South American regimes, and Special Section (1975) is about French collaboration in Vichy France.

This movie is about Vatican collaboration. No other word describes the picture of the Roman Catholic authorities that director and co-writer Costa-Gavras chooses to convey - and which has become a commonplace of recent historiography. What emerges is secret, unacknowledged Vichy-ism practised by a reactionary church hierarchy which had abandoned the anti-Nazi rhetoric of the pre-war Pope Pius XI. It now thought of Hitler as a bulwark against godless Bolsheviks, had no love for the "perfidious Jews" of the old Good Friday liturgy and was terrified of taking a stand and losing their extraterritorial status. As one woman puts it here: "The Germans will come in here and loot all our treasure!" Like Hochhuth's original play, the film has generated controversy and resentment.

It centres on two characters, one real, or real-ish, the other fictional. Kurt Gerstein was a genuine Waffen-SS officer, here played with raw honesty and commitment by Ulrich Tukur, who claimed at Nuremberg to have tried delaying the proceedings and informing the Vatican authorities. These attempts are considerably amplified in the movie. The other character, played in a faintly choirboy style by Mathieu Kassovitz, is the idealistic Jesuit priest and junior diplomat Riccardo Fontana, who increasingly desperately tries to get the Pope to speak out - and ends up himself drawn to sacrifice, even martyrdom. He is fictional, but his character is interestingly similar to the early life of Pius XII.

Costa-Gavras alternates between these two worlds and two belief systems. There is the world of the SS officers, grimly prosecuting the policy of extermination in the east while Operation Barbarossa leads the Reich to calamity, and there is the Vatican, with its scarlet-clad figures whisking enigmatically down corridors and shutting their eyes to an atrocity that it is their moral duty to condemn. The effect is a moral equivalence between the two, their culpabilities increased, rather than diminished by the existence of the two parallel dissidents Gerstein and Fontana. Finally, the Vatican's head-in-the-sand approach has disastrous results, not merely in the abstract arena of moral discourse, but at the end of the war, when Jews are taken away from the streets of Rome itself - "even converts!" as one ashen-faced cardinal puts it.

Through everything, Costa-Gavras moves with a steady, even martial tread; he mostly refrains from the melodrama of which he is often accused, but his approach, even his film, shows if not naivety than a certain lack of perspective. The Vatican is being urged by both protagonists to get off the fence and speak out - to stop the slaughter, or at any rate to inspire opposition to it. But with both the Russians and the Americans in the war against Hitler, it is difficult to see what more real, practical action Fontana expects to be taken against Nazi policy, at home and abroad. One answer of course might be for the Allies to bombard the railway tracks leading to the death camps. This is something that Costa-Gavras raises, but skirts around.

At one stage, Gerstein is asked about atrocity rumours, and in order not to blow his cover, he is obliged to laugh them off: "Stop listening to British propaganda!" But what British "propaganda" is that exactly? Surely the British were highly cautious about discussing the death camps during the war, something that enrages Jewish commentators to this very day?

Costa-Gavras's movie obtusely veers away from this pertinent issue too, effectively insisting on the Vatican's sole moral and practical responsibility. Audiences and historians of the 21st century may now consider this emphasis obtuse in its exclusiveness. But the film persuasively shows the Vatican to be coldly arrogant and haughtily implacable, set on a course of pure pusillanimity. Costa-Gavras brings to his movie seriousness and high-mindedness, and elicits performances of intelligence and distinction from his cast.


THE LONDON OBSERVER, Out of sight, out of mind

Amen, a study of the Holocaust, marks a powerful return to form for Greek filmmaker Costa-Gavras

by Ryan Gilbey Sunday, July 14, 2002

As cinema becomes dominated by one kind of CG, it is refreshing to recall a time when an altogether different CG exerted a potent influence. When the Greek filmmaker Costa-Gavras was in his heyday in the late Sixties and early Seventies, computer-generated movies were just a daydream that John Lasseter had during double maths. Which is not to suggest that those fine early pictures, such as Z and State of Siege, were rudimentary: the breakneck editing predated Oliver Stone, while the quasi-documentary grittiness and politicised outrage foreshadowed Ken Loach. Costa-Gavras understood that an audience's enlightenment comes with entertainment: only once you have pinned them to their seats can you hit them with the truth.

His new picture, the French-German co-production Amen, is, in some respects, a partial recovery after two decades of lacklustre American ventures. The film, based on Rolf Hochhuth's play The Representative, concerns the Holocaust and those in power who saw what was going on and turned away and those underlings who struggled to convince the world that the trains rumbling into Auschwitz and Belzec were not carrying factory workers to new jobs.

The Nazi officer Kurt Gerstein (Ulrich Tukur), who has masterminded the development of the gas Zyklon B without foreseeing its function, is one of the first to squeal. He shares his knowledge with a Jesuit priest, Father Riccardo (Mathieu Kassovitz), and they endeavour to alert the Vatican. As with most Costa-Gavras films, good intentions are quickly crushed beneath the cogs of bureaucracy. Gerstein and Riccardo discover that the US government has already written to the Vatican requesting verification of rumours about Nazi concentration camps.

The Vatican, in turn, has written back to the US government, also requesting verification. Human lives are reduced to polite correspondence idling in out-trays. Pope Pius XII keeps quiet and one of the film's saddest scenes has Gerstein and Riccardo waiting by the radio for the papal denouncement that we know will never come.

Amen was originally titled 'Eyewitness', which would have been overstating the case, though that word does underline the film's key irony: every dramatic moment here, from the first deployment of Zyklon B to the fates of the main characters, is hidden from our hungry eyes. Just as the movie wrings tension from the unpromising spectacle of powerful people doing nothing, so the chosen technique is one of concealment. We see the trains but not their cargo; a chimney's thick plume of black smoke is explicit enough.

This is largely a movie that stands or falls on the strength of its reaction shots. Costa-Gavras knows that we have gorged ourselves on images of the Holocaust. Better to leave the donkeywork to our festering imaginations and to Gerstein, who, after a day-trip to Belzec, wears the expression of a man who has just comprehended the business of evil and his own complicity in it.

The movie is at its strongest when it alights on the telltale glimmers of human banality that illuminate the greater horror: Gerstein's pregnant wife predicting that she will give birth to a future lieutenant because she can feel the baby goose-stepping in the womb; the sinister doctor (Ulrich MŸhe) doodling faceless bodies onto an illustration of a vacant gas chamber.

The gravest error of movies like Schindler's List and Life is Beautiful was their unwillingness to confront the anonymity, the blandness, of the Holocaust. When Roberto Benigni awarded himself a special death scene in Life is Beautiful, it was a cowardly sop to the notion that all other life halts while a movie star is on screen. It had nothing to do with the Holocaust.

You will not find such shortcomings in Amen. (The decision to film in German-accented English is the sole discernible compromise.) Close-ups are traditionally reserved for those characters favoured by the narrative, but early on in Amen this convention is rudely over turned when a sweet-faced young woman is abruptly plucked from her privileged place in the story to become another statistic. As the film winds toward its conclusion, you pray that this ruthlessness will not be forsaken. And, without giving anything away, it is not. The picture remains muted to the last.

Only occasionally is Costa-Gavras unsure of how to animate his anger. Much of the film comprises men talking in rooms with high ceilings and you can detect a hint of cabin fever: the director throws in a thunderstorm, or a driving scene, as though he is concerned that we might get anxious. Then there are entire sequences when he appears to have wandered off set and left the camera running.

Of course, some of those moments have enough inbuilt drama to survive without directorial emphasis. A conversation in which Nazi generals cheerfully discuss the extermination schedule for 1948 and 1949 does not require anything but the attention of your disbelieving ears.


REEL LIFE REVIEW

Based on Rolf Hochhuth's play The Representative, the historical thriller Amen is politically-minded director Costa-Gavras' (Music Box, Missing) denunciation of the Vatican under Pope Pius XII. Gavras doesn't need melodrama to make the tension apparent, alternating between the world of the SS officers grimly set to their horrifying deeds, to the immaculate corridors of the Vatican where the Roman Catholic authorities turn away from their obligations of moral condemnation. Indeed, more concerned about the threat of Communism than to the fate of "a few" Jews and worried about their own neutrality, the Vatican refused to speak out against the Nazis. The film doesn't show any of the atrocities directly (audiences have already had their fill), but alluding to them is just as powerful (the empty trains coming back from the camps, the crematorium chimneys billowing dark smoke, the powerful close-up reactions of the eye-witnesses). Though the realization that the world governments knew of the truth but did (or could do) little about it is not surprising, the film is at its most harrowing when showing the efficiency at which the task was taken by those involved, from the engineers to the bureaucrats, men whose conscience had been put on hold for their country. There are no Jewish characters in evidence here, those extras that we see limited to being powerless, anonymous victims of the Holocaust, a statement that is all the more terrifying by its blandness. The unlikely hero is the dramatized real figure of Kurt Gerstein, an SS officer who's testimony was crucial during the Nuremberg trials, superbly played by Tukur. As for the fictional young priest, played with intense idealism by Kassovitz, he is necessary to take us around the Vatican community, showing the urgency of the situation reduced to being politely dismissed. A powerful, well-acted true drama, Amen is an important testament to another side of a dark chapter in human history. Drama: 8/10


BOX OFFICE MAGAZINE

by Wade Major

AMEN ***1/2

Greek-born filmmaker Konstantinos Gavras, best known to the world as Costa-Gavras, may very well be the last great filmmaker of conscience cinema, a genre that he almost single-handedly created with his landmark 1968 film "Z." It might even be contended that Costa-Gavras is the only one who has ever even been able to make such films work on a dramatic level, free of the self-importance to which other filmmakers feel obliged to chain their characters. Not that they have always succeeded--some of his pictures have been downright failures. But what cannot be taken from Costa-Gavras on any level, and what always makes his films worth watching, is an unfailing determination to present complex heroes and heroines possessed of obsessively principled devotion that is both credible and challenging.

Ironically, Costa-Gavras' newest film, "Amen," marks the first time that he has tackled head-on the subject of the Holocaust, a topic with which he previously only flirted after-the-fact in the Joe Eszterhas-scripted "The Music Box." The English-language "Amen" is loosely adapted from Rolf Hochhuth's fact-based 1962 play "The Representative" and centers on the exploits of expert hygienist Kurt Gerstein (Ulrich Tukur), a deeply religious man who has ascended to the position of officer in the SS primarily because his skills are so badly needed to forestall disease and illness among the troops. But when he discovers that the disinfectant Zyklon B is being ordered in large quantities for the more diabolical purpose of exterminating Jews, Protestantism instantly overtakes patriotism and Gerstein makes it his crusade to inform the world.

His initial strategy is to leak word of the Holocaust to both the German populace and the outside world in hopes that popular outcry will be able to stop it in much the same way that previous, more limited persecutions were arrested. It soon becomes evident, however, that stopping an intended genocide already well underway will require more than a mere street protest. Unable to motivate protestant leaders paralyzed by fear of reprisals, Gerstein turns to the Catholic Church in hopes that a firm statement from Pope Pius XII (Marcel Iures) might stop the killing. Though this route proves no less frustrating, Gerstein wins the trust and heart of an idealistic young priest named Riccardo Fontana (Mathieu Kassovitz) who, through familial connections at the Vatican, believes he can alert the Pope accordingly.

"Amen" is, at least for a time, a gripping and emotionally powerful picture that shows promise of evolving into a kind of "Schindler's List," riding heavily upon a passionate performance from Tukur and the ominous recurring imagery of boxcars both filled and empty, tirelessly transporting entire families and communities to their doom. Unfortunately, the story isn't able to find much narrative latitude once Gerstein hands the ball off to Fontana. The futility of their joint attempts to alert the world, along with the sobering revelations (the accuracy of which are still debated) that Pius XII and others moderated their condemnation of the Nazi regime out of broader political and religious considerations, is compelling fodder for discussion but scarcely sufficient to satisfy the dramatic demands of the film's second half. Also problematic is the movie's attempt to generate some form of suspense from a historic episode as familiar and well-documented as the Holocaust. Only when Fontana himself hitches a ride to a concentration camp near the end does "Amen" recapture some of its initial momentum--a powerful denouement that's still too little, too late to help the movie fully right itself.

Still, even flawed Costa-Gavras is generally worth watching, if for nothing more substantial than the painstaking care he gives to every facet of the filmmaking process. That there are more important issues being dealt with here is enough to make "Amen" worthy of consideration, despite its shortcomings. The all-European cast of mostly unknown German actors is a wonderful touch that gives the picture an added air of authenticity above and beyond already impeccable production values. From Tukur to the always-enjoyable Kassovitz to the great Marcel Iures whose role as Pius XII is in striking contrast to his other recent turn as the calculating Nazi POW camp commandant in "Hart's War," "Amen's" makers and cast clearly believe that they are serving a higher purpose in telling the story. Even though the movie falls short of realizing that purpose, the mere fact that it even has one places it on admirable footing.


INDIEWIRE

BERLIN 2002: Costa-Gavras Returns to Form "Amen"

by Peter Brunette

(indieWIRE/02.14.02) -- While it hardly breaks new cinematic ground, Costa-Gavras' latest film, "Amen.," shown here Wednesday in the competition, is a solid, even engrossing drama whose central theme, the reluctance of the Vatican to speak out about Nazi atrocities during World War II, is brilliantly explored in all its aching complexity. There is no bitter condemnation of the Pope here, as some Catholics might fear, but rather a sensitive probing of the multiple agendas at work, with no one -- except the Nazis -- being singled out for blame. The Greek-born, Paris-based Costa-Gavras has always been one the world's finest political filmmakers, with triumphs such as "Z," "The Confession," and "Missing," to his credit, and it is very good indeed to see him back in form here after more recent missteps such as the Hollywood film "Mad City," which starred John Travolta and Dustin Hoffman.

Basing his story on Rolf Hochhuth's famous 1963 play "The Representative," Costa-Gavras does a fine job of opening the film up beyond its original theatrical frame. The Holocaust is, tragically, all too cinematic to begin with, and that has helped. But even the dramatic encounters between two or three people in small rooms, successfully avoid the deadly whiff of the stage. Nor, thank Heaven, is anyone allowed to give speeches, and thus the dialogue always rings true.

Interestingly, one of the central characters, Kurt Gerstein (Ulrich Tukur), the inventor of Zyklon-B gas and devoted Christian who takes it upon himself to alert the world about what the Nazis are doing to the Jews, is based on a real-life person, while his counterpart, the "representative," Father Riccardo Fontana (Mathieu Kassovitz), who seeks condemnation of the Nazis from the Holy Father, is a fictional character. The blending of fact and fiction, however, is seamless and the each man's struggle to bear Christian witness is convincing and powerful. The Jewish-French actor Kassovitz (a well-known director in his own right, who recently starred in "Amélie") is nuanced and believable as an Italian priest. Tukur does a nice job of conveying the multiple, even contradictory aspects of the SS officer's personality; he is a devoted father, a bon vivant host, a convinced moralist, and an efficient scientist who comes to regret having invented the toxic gas which was intended to be used on vermin, not people.

Many of the film's best moments come in encounters between fathers and sons, on both the German side as well as the Italian, with the priest's father being an especially richly drawn character who eventually sees the light. Gerstein's father, in contrast, never does, and his and his son's differing visions of their country's honor are carefully distinguished without ever losing dramatic punch. Even the American reluctance to save the Jews through negotiation with Hitler, as articulated by the U.S. ambassador to the Vatican, seems horrifying yet almost justifiable, given the Americans' desire to crush the Germans militarily before all else.

One thing that European critics here at the Berlinale have complained about is the fact that the film was shot almost entirely in English. In this particular city, so drenched with such sad history, the film's language did make it seem slightly artificial, but this should not be a problem for audiences in America (if and when it gets U.S. distribution, which it certainly deserves). Perhaps expecting this sort of criticism, the filmmakers included the following quite reasonable statement at the beginning of the press book: "'Amen.' is a 100% French production in association with Germany. English was the language uniting our German, French, Romanian, Italian and American actors." The only jarring note comes when the German characters occasionally break into song, in German, but presumably this fault can be remedied by some judicious dubbing.

Another challenge for all Holocaust-themed movies, of course, is avoiding the iconology of roundup and train cars, whose very familiarity can numb us to the human tragedy we witness on screen. Costa-Gavras gets around this by shooting most of these scenes at night, which makes them feel fresh, and, most importantly, by allowing us to see everything through Gerstein's incredulous eyes as he discovers what's going on in those "work" camps in Poland. By this means, Costa-Gavras allows us to re-experience these potentially clichŽd events in all their original horror. Where he is less successful is in his repeated use of an empty train, puffing black smoke as it roars through the night to the accompaniment of frenzied strings. The first few times you see this motif, it's haunting, but it quickly becomes affected. Every other aspect of the director's filmmaking is, as always, thoroughly competent, but never especially exciting or imaginative. Luckily, the drama itself is tense and thematically complicated enough to keep the viewer closely involved.