THROUGH KAEL'S EYES : 'The Deep End,' 'Ghost World' & 'Fighter' - Review

Commonweal, Sept 28, 2001 by Rand Richards Cooper

If you're going to track down just one of these films, perhaps it should be Fighter, Amir Bar-Lev's poignant documentary account of two septuagenarian Czech Jews, Jan Wiener and Arnost Lustig, who met in this country as emigres decades ago, and now take a trip back to the scenes of their war-ravaged youth. The film is named for Wiener, a boxer and soldier who escaped Nazi-held Czechoslovakia and joined the RAF. But it could be called Fighter and Writer, because Lustig, whose family (like Wiener's) was wiped out in the Holocaust, is a professor and novelist--and the journey is prompted by his interest in writing about Wiener's heroic life.

The trip starts in high spirits, but to our fascination--and surely the filmmakers'--the camaraderie between the two men disintegrates. Things begin to sour in Prague, where Wiener dramatically recounts his postwar return, in British uniform, to the office of an anti-Semitic bureaucrat who had humiliated him, and whom he had fantasized about killing. He describes the man begging for his life, and his own cathartic experience in deciding to spare him. Listening, Lustig decides to blur the picture a bit. "Maybe you made a mistake," he says. "Maybe you should have killed him." After all, the man went on to become a Communist functionary, and probably did a lot of harm, including to Jews. Wiener will have none of this--especially from Lustig, who during the postwar Communist regime in Czechoslovakia was a committed party member, while Wiener himself, falsely accused as a British spy, spent five years in a labor camp. "What did you do while I was in prison?" he bursts out when he and Lustig visit the former police headquarters where he was interrogated.

Fighter has the fascination of Louis Malle's My Dinner with Andre, the same tangle of the philosophical and personal, revealed through conversation. Lustig is an intellectual, by habit and training a busy contextualizer, for whom the soldier's black-and-white morality is alien. "Morality is a child of necessity," he says at one point. "If you are hungry, you change your morality." A storyteller, he embroiders and expands, dissolving all sins--including his own--in the mordant fact of human fallenness. His outlook is relativistic and deterministic. "What would have happened to me if I had been born a German boy?" he muses aloud. "How many Jews would I have killed?" Wiener, on the other hand, is idealistic, humorless--and increasingly angry. Some people are good. Others are evil. Why is Lustig trying to change the subject?

In Italy Wiener tracks down relatives of a long-dead man who was kind to him, searching for someone who remembers. No one does. Lustig, meanwhile, speculates about why an Italian fascist prison officer helped a young Czech Jew instead of turning him over to the Germans. Did the man himself perhaps have a son? Perhaps a son who had died in the war? Did Wiener's extreme good looks possibly play a role?

For the writer, this is just thinking aloud, exploring the material of the story. To Wiener, his sacred memories are being defiled. "I don't give a shit for this kind of analysis!" he complains. "It bothers me. I don't want it to be diluted by prattling around with this kind of nonsense!"