Emotionally gut-wrenching and deeply humanistic Holocaust drama. Told patiently while masterfully juggling different tones (really surprised by how humorous this is) with a strong visual flair, without ever being sentimental, and with a breathtaking third act so tense and full of real despair, concerned around an affecting moral conflict of an average citizen caught in a difficult situation. Ida Kaminski and Joseph Kroner are both absolutely wonderful as the two leads, both evokes an insane amount of sympathy. That ending. Certainly a new favorite of mine, don't miss this powerful gem.
what’s worth more,my own lifeor the life of a thousand?i could save so many, yet, in doing so, bring my eyes to close for the final time. but how can this be? how can such a thing possibly be fair? it’s as though i have a profundity for the future, yet have no means of utilising such knowledge. i have been allowed to see the entire world from above, yet may use none of it for my own good, nor for the good of any other.i wish my life would not seem the most important of all,but how can i justify ending my own, when so many tell me to live proudly, to flaunt my life to the skies above - for i still have it?what if every face i look at is a mere dream, what if they are sent to fester guilt in my gut,forcing me to end this life,and live out the rest of my days in the fiery depthsof that life to come?nothing can be so easily obtained in a world such as thisas the closing of ones eyes,as though casting a farewell to a childhood home,for good.yet, i know, i have lived for many years,i have experienced the sun on my face,the scorch of its deathly burns,the shade of the green trees that tower above,filling the air with their endless hope and optimism.i have ridden the greatest trains to all the cities of the world,i have watched the glory of my peoplecrumble to death before my very eyes.and yet there are those souls, those innocently guilty souls,who have experienced none of it. do they deserve their life more than i?do they?
I wanted to call this unserious just because of how much the plot hinges on an impossibly oblivious old woman but it does successfully play into the eventual horror of the ending. It's basically a massive tract on complicity. That even if you like and have fond relationships with people in a persecuted group, the odds are that when you believe it to be a you or them scenario, you'll choose you. So much of this is a light comedy with the obvious lingering horror in the background. It's 1942 in Czechoslovakia, this old woman is jewish, this light and goofy relationship she has developed with our protagonist, a man designated her aryan controller, is built on a foundation that we know can't last. This woman who fundamentally doesn't understand the rise of the nazis being somewhat exemplary of so many demographics within an oppressed group who will be oblivious to the political forces in play that imagine their mass murder a necessity. Kids, the learning disabled and, yes, some of the elderly not understanding the situation and it being immensely difficult to explain it to them.There's a danger of this setup being twee and in so many other holocaust films that toy with naivety that's precisely what happened. But The Shop on Main Street manages to avoid this by following through with the horror of its premise. Our protagonist is a coward. He doesn't like what's happening, in fact he outright detests it. But the second it pops into his drunken head that his protecting her could be dangerous for him something really frightening emerges. This panicked, self-pitying figure of complicity. The final twenty minutes or so managed to massively makeup for the misgivings I'd developed to that point and this elderly woman's obliviousness just adds to the utterly intense misery of it. Her shrieking "pogrom" speaking to this imprecise but historically charged understanding of what's happening. There's something powerful in taking on "the everyman's" position in historic genocide and examining some of the ways such a person might be complicit. It makes it far more uncomfortable. Freya's rating: 4.5/5
