Based on "La Tregua" the bestselling autobiography by Primo Levi about his return from Auschwitz, the film inevitably had to compress the many stories, characters and events narrated in that unforgettable book, but unfortunately it went the wrong way.
It starts with Primo and a fellow prisoner carrying a body to a common grave and watching four Russians soldiers on horseback approaching the Lager, just like in the book. That was January 27th, 1945 and Primo Levi was very sick. After that day he spent over one month in the infirmary managed in Auschwitz by the Red Army and when he finally left in March, he was extremely weak and emaciated.
In the film, John Turturro is just a bit skinnier than usual but otherwise healthy and wandering around Krakow with the Greek Mordo Nahum, without any problems. Once Primo bonds with the Italians Cesare, Daniele, Ferrari and a couple of others, they are given minimal back stories and then sent from a temporary refugee camp to the Red House as to a bucolic holiday, waiting for the train that will take them back to Italy.
Time is squandered for scenes with a couple of attractive Russian women (Galina and Irina) and for an almost grotesque scene of Primo following a female former inmate to a hut in the woods.
The poignancy, drama, difficulties and nostalgia of the characters are glossed over making them little more than props around Primo. In real life, Primo Levi was a talker, who repeatedly expressed his need to communicate verbally with people, but in the film he's a silent, passive man, almost transfixed by Galina first and by the female inmate after.
At the end of the movie, in Munich a German soldier is seen kneeling to Primo when he shows his striped jacket with the yellow star, but in reality Levi wrote that the Germans were totally indifferent and avoided the refugees as much as possible. They did not feel guilty at all.
Finally, the soundtrack is atrocious and omnipresent, a sort of out of contest melancholic country western theme, strident with the geographical location and the contest of the story.
Yet despite the mediocre results, I still give it a seven, because somehow it manages to convey almost the right feeling, albeit skipping over the harshest most depressing aspects. At least, it made this true story more widely known.
It starts with Primo and a fellow prisoner carrying a body to a common grave and watching four Russians soldiers on horseback approaching the Lager, just like in the book. That was January 27th, 1945 and Primo Levi was very sick. After that day he spent over one month in the infirmary managed in Auschwitz by the Red Army and when he finally left in March, he was extremely weak and emaciated.
In the film, John Turturro is just a bit skinnier than usual but otherwise healthy and wandering around Krakow with the Greek Mordo Nahum, without any problems. Once Primo bonds with the Italians Cesare, Daniele, Ferrari and a couple of others, they are given minimal back stories and then sent from a temporary refugee camp to the Red House as to a bucolic holiday, waiting for the train that will take them back to Italy.
Time is squandered for scenes with a couple of attractive Russian women (Galina and Irina) and for an almost grotesque scene of Primo following a female former inmate to a hut in the woods.
The poignancy, drama, difficulties and nostalgia of the characters are glossed over making them little more than props around Primo. In real life, Primo Levi was a talker, who repeatedly expressed his need to communicate verbally with people, but in the film he's a silent, passive man, almost transfixed by Galina first and by the female inmate after.
At the end of the movie, in Munich a German soldier is seen kneeling to Primo when he shows his striped jacket with the yellow star, but in reality Levi wrote that the Germans were totally indifferent and avoided the refugees as much as possible. They did not feel guilty at all.
Finally, the soundtrack is atrocious and omnipresent, a sort of out of contest melancholic country western theme, strident with the geographical location and the contest of the story.
Yet despite the mediocre results, I still give it a seven, because somehow it manages to convey almost the right feeling, albeit skipping over the harshest most depressing aspects. At least, it made this true story more widely known.