Not an easy task: how to make a comedy about the Nazi occupation and the Jewish persecution without disdaining the intrinsic tragedy of it? One possible solution: to create some characters complex enough to avoid the pitfalls of a movie indulging exclusively in laughable caricatures. That's the merit of Hrebejk's `Divided We Fall', a finely acted comedy about a moving Czech couple (Josef and Marie) who manage, against all odds, to secretly shelter a Jew (David) during the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia. The screenplay has many ingredients for vaudeville situations: the presence of an inconvenient friend (Horst); the logistics of hiding someone in a house; Josef and Marie's difficulty to have a baby, but director Hrebejk tries to explore them with a light hand, never abandoning the dramatic aspects of the story. A bit heavy-handed are only the music and the frequent use of a peculiar slow motion camera, which artificially exaggerate tension and emotion, but the leading couple of actors (Cizek and Ciskova) more than compensate for it (7/10).
Review of Divided We Fall
