Irina Starshenbaum and Douglas Booth shine in Michael Winterbottom’s tense, topical historical drama
By James Verniere/Boston Movie News
Shooting on a modest budget in Puglia, Italy and using vintage Movietone News newsreel footage as a kind of time-traveling, fairy dust, director and co-writer Michael Winterbottom of the glorious period comedy “Tristram Shandy” (2005) manages to create a credible Palestine of the late 1930s and early 1940s to tell a unique, engrossing, real-life version of “Romeo and Juliet.”
The “Juliet” character of Winterbottom’s “Shoshana” is namesake Shoshana Borochov (Russian actor Irina Starshenbaum), an independent woman and feminist, whose educated, politically involved friends are enmeshed in the heated politics of the times. Shoshana is a member of the Haganah, a paramilitary group that trains Jews to defend themselves with arms. Shoshana’s friends almost all disapprove of her romance with a British police officer at a time when the British have occupied Palestine for practically two decades. After World War I, Jews start arriving in Palestine by the hundreds of thousands. In 1935, the Arab uprising begins. The Jews establish the Jewish capital, Tel Aviv, and must decide how they will respond to British invaders and Arab attackers. Both Jews and Arabs use bombs to attack civilians and military alike. A Jewish poet and revolutionary named Avraham Stern (Aury Alby) establishes the violent, radical group the Irgun (Hello, Menachem Begin), which the British struggle to root out.
Tom Wilkin (a fine and nuanced Douglas Booth), this story’s “Romeo,” is a romantic, who is charming and handsome enough to make us believe that Shoshana would risk the disapproval and anger of her friends by falling in love with him. The villain of the piece is not entirely villainous.
He is British police officer Geoffrey Morton (“Harry Potter” veteran Harry Melling), who is not averse to taking drastic measures to root out the “terrorists” on both sides and who knows and indeed socializes with Wilkin and Shoshana and may indeed envy Wilkin’s relationship with the intelligent and attractive Jewish woman. Moving along the sidelines of the action is Robert Chambers (Ian Hart), a shadowy figure and an official in the British Mandate, who hovers over most of the action.
“Shoshana” is both a piece of history and a film that is as topical as it comes, given the horrors unfolding in Gaza at this very moment in history. Tom meets Shoshana at a dance, where she, the daughter of a dead Zionist-Socialist, accuses him of being a spy and then offers to go back to his place. We notice that Tom carries a concealed pistol and has a chessboard in his room. Shoshana wryly refers to Tom as “Detective Wilkin.” Does it give their sexual encounters a forbidden frisson?
Cinematographer Giles Nuttgens and production designer Sergio Tribastone work miracles in recreating pre-World War II Palestine. The action in “Shoshana” is both a metaphor for the sexual, familial and political tensions in any romantic relationship and a real-life depiction of the struggle to establish a Jewish homeland. The struggle involves espionage, murders and reprisals, arrests and torture, hatred and violence. And yet Winterbottom and his actors manage to keep the flame of love fiercely burning amid all the blown-off limbs, shootings and flogging. “Shoshana” is both the most politically relevant film in theaters at the moment and the most romantic. Winterbottom, Starshenbaum and Booth prove that the most memorable lovers on screen and off are also the most ardent adversaries.
‘Shoshana’
Rating: Not rated. (In English, Arabic, Hebrew and Russian with subtitles)
Cast: Irina Starshenbaum, Douglas Booth, Henry Melling
Director: Michael Winterbottom
Writers: Winterbottom, Laurence Coriat, Paul Viragh
Running time: 121 minutes
Where to Watch: Coolidge Corner Theatre
Grade: A-
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