Divided We Fall (film)
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Divided We Fall (Czech : Musíme si pomáhat) is a 2000 Czech film directed by Jan Hřebejk. It was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film.
[edit] Story
The film opens in 1939, when some Jews are afraid of the Nazis. Horst, who is married to a German woman and collaborates with the Nazis, brings food to a nice childless couple, the invalid Josef and Marie. Josef hates the Nazis. Josef finds David, who has escaped the concentration camp. Josef and Marie hide him in their apartment. Horst makes an unannounced visit, bringing presents as usual. Marie is ambivalent about their secret: on one hand she never misses an opportunity to blame her husband for bringing in the Jew, but on the other hand she is merciful and sympathetic with the poor kid locked in the closet day and night. She suggests that Josef accepts Horst's job offer, so as to get more protection and deflect possible suspicions. Josef accepts, and is considered a collaborator by the neighbors (who had tried to give David over to the Nazi authorities, when he first escaped from a concentration camp), while Marie spends the days learning French from David, and getting more and more tender towards him, as if she, the childless mother, had finally found her baby to nurse and protect. Horst's visits become more frequent, and one evening a farce takes place. Josef gets the response: he can't have children. Humiliated, Horst takes revenge on Marie by forcing them to provide lodging for a Nazi officer, who had suffered a heart-attack after two of his young sons had been killed at the front. Marie refuses to accept him on the ground that she is pregnant. But now she has to get pregnant, and Josef proposes that David do it. Marie and David have sex. She does get pregnant, and Horst has to apologize to her. As the Germans are beginning to lose, Horst becomes more human. He is actually a native Czech-German. He saves their lives when the Germans search the street house by house. Finally, the Germans are defeated and the Czech people take brutal revenge on them. Right then Marie has to give birth. Josef runs outside looking for a doctor to help. But everywhere is chaos.
He finally finds the new commander: his old neighbor Franta. But Franta remembers him as a collaborator and orders his arrest. Josef protests his innocence and invites them to check in person at his house, that he risked his life to protect a Jew. They allow him to pick his doctor. In the jails, Josef does not see his doctor but finds Horst, crouched in a corner. Josef risks his life one more time, this time to save the collaborator who saved his life once: Josef tells the partisans that Horst is a doctor. The partisans escort them to Josef's house, driving through the ruins of the city. In another slapstick-style scene, Horst pretends to be a doctor and helps Marie, who is terrified to see Horst acting as the doctor. Now Josef needs to produce the Jew, because the new "revolutionaries" want to kill him for collaboration, but David, scared by the armed men, has run out. The captain of the "revolutionaries" doesn't believe him and is about to shoot him without a trial, but David shows up at the last minute, after Josef's despairing plea: "Let us be human!" The baby is born. Both David and the neighbor Franta go along with Josef's lie about Horst, and let the partisans believe that he is indeed a doctor, thus saving his life. Days later, Josef walks the baby through the devastated streets of his city. In the ruins, we see, round a table all the people nonsensically killed during the previous conflagrafion. An aria from J.S. Bach's St Matthew's Passion (Erbarme dich, mein Gott, God, please have mercy on our frailty!) gives the denoumenent of the film a very powerful ending.
The film seems to argue that oppression under totalitarian regimes, such as Nazism was so strong that we are in no position to judge what people were forced to do under the circumstances. It is, possibly, the best film by Jan Hřebejk, whose other feature films are somewhat stereotyped renditions of various other traumatic historical periods of Czech modern history. While Hřebejk records details of contemporary life rather convincingly, he is prone to myth-making and his analysis of, for instance, the reform period of the Prague Spring in Czechoslovakia (Pelíšky, Cosy Dens) is totally ahistorical. Czech popular audiences love his films, nevertheless. Kráska v nesnázích (Beauty in Need) was voted the best film of the Karlovy Vary Film Festival in 2006 by the audiences.)
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