Passageren
Back on the
List I am continuing on the depressive strain to late. This time with the
Polish movie “Pasazerka” (Passenger), a movie that largely takes place in
Auschwitz. That, more or less, sets the tone.
“Passenger”
is an odd movie in the sense that it is unfinished. The director Andrzej Munk
died during the shooting of the movie and the end-product is a combination of
footage and stills with a narrator filling the gaps. It therefore feels like
half movie, half documentary about the movie. It is strange and I cannot say
that worked very well. It certainly made me focus more on the process of making
the film than the story of the film.
The story
also drowns in the subject matter. Any movie featuring a death camp will overwhelm
the viewer with the enormous tragedy of millions of people being systematically
killed, and for the few who are not being killed outright, total degradation. I
personally have a hard time with Holocaust movies and this one pressed exactly
the wrong buttons for me. In one scene we see a large group of children walking
into a gas chamber, completely oblivious to their imminent death, some holding
hands with nurses guiding them there. Then a German guard prepares the poisonous
gas, with no second thought for what he is doing. I felt like puking.
I have been
to Theresienstadt, mostly because my wife’s great-grandparents were killed
there, and that was bad enough. A real death camp I could not visit. It would
be too much.
Somewhere
there is a story, but I am not really sure about it. We follow a woman, Liza
(Aleksandra Slaska) who is a guard, an overseer, with SS tags and all. On a boat
trip she sees a woman she thinks is a woman from her past and so she tells her
ignorant husband an edited version of her past, something about that she saved
that woman’s life in Auschwitz. Later we get the honest story which is something
about that Liza and that woman, Marta (Anna Ciepielewska) waged a mental war of
supremacy on each other.
This is
where I had to let go of the story. I simply have no idea what this conflict
was about and how it played out. It also seems of very little consequence with the
pictures of all that misery around them. We see the barracks where the prisoners
live, we see naked women being chased though the camp, we see prisoners play
music for the staff and we watch endless columns of people walking to their
death. Who cares about a story about a guard and a prisoner fighting for mental
supremacy?
“Passenger”
won awards in Cannes and, I think, Venice, but I think that was more for the
subject matter than the quality of the film itself. A half-finished film with
an obscure conflict? No, it is the pictures from Auschwitz that matters. Those
are pictures I remember.
Frankly, I
just want to move on to the next movie.