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DIVIDED WE FALL
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In Two Cheers for Democracy, E. M. Forster wrote, "If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country." Such a spirit inhabits the little noticed small Czech gem DIVIDED WE FALL.
In 1937 David (Csongor Kassai), Josef (Boleslav Polivka), and Horst (Jaroslav Dusek) are good friends despite straddling class (David's father owns the factory where Josef is Horst's foreman) and ethnicity (Czech, Jew, and German). But the war comes, sending David away, rendering aging childless husband Josef unemployed, idle, and shiftless, and elevating Horst into a jumped-up Nazi tin-pot bigwig. Until 1943, when one night a hollow-eyed David stumbles back to Josef's townhouse, having bribed his way out of the concentration camp …
What can they do? Josef and Maria (Anna Sislova) displace the pig they had been curing in their secret larder and move in David. At first it will be just a few days, but then they realize they are in more danger if David leaves (and is captured), so Josef's moment of compassion draws him ever more deeply into the deception. Each time bluff clumsy loutish Horst comes by -- "Open up, it's the Gestapo!" he cheerfully shouts one day, then breaks into gales of laughter and gives them a small present. -- Josef and Maria die a little. As Horst's hints grow ever-broader, and he takes ever more familiar liberties with Maria, Josef in moral desperation decides to deflect suspicion by becoming an apparent collaborator.
At the opening of his novel MOTHER NIGHT (itself made into a wonderfully complex WW2 movie starring, of all people, Nick Nolte and John Goodman), Kurt Vonnegut writes its moral: "We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful what we pretend to be." Josef despises who become his friends and loathes who he must be. His world becomes ever smaller, his horizons ever shorter -- just survive next week, just survive tomorrow, just survive Horst's visit.
Despite some misguided blurb quotes, DIVIDED WE FALL is no comedy (other than one brief bed-hopping scene that borrows rather too much from French country house farces). Rather, it is compassionately absurd, resisting both melodrama and cliché. Every focus character is multifaceted, by turns appealing and awful, most especially the odious yet pathetic Horst. Unlike LIFE IS BEAUTIFUL, which it resembles only in its superficial externalities (Nazi-occupied territory), this movie neither trivializes the war nor indulges in syrup (except near the very end, when the Biblical significance of Josef and Maria's names comes around rather too neatly). The acting is thoroughly persuasive (aided, of course, by the actors' total obscurity to American audiences), the story absorbing, the ending moving.
American audiences embrace foreign films only if they are spared having to wrestle with subtitles. As LA FEMME NIKITA was remade shot for shot into POINT OF NO RETURN, we can only wish the same future for DIVIDED WE FALL. But until that day, this is a movie worth seeking out.