|
|
The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas
Director: Mark Herman
Release Date: 16 October 2008
Starring: Laszlo Aron, Amber Beattie, Asa Butterfield, Attila Egyed, Vera Farmiga, Bela Fesztbaum, Rupert Friend
Language: English
Country: United Kingdom
Here you can find comprehensive database of movies with film synopses, reviews, casts and characters, theatrical trailers and photos of upcoming films, production notes, official sites and photos from new releases, as well as exclusive interviews and articles, news, Read movie reviews of current films from top critics and many other sources.
The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas is a 2008 British drama film directed by Mark Herman and produced by David Heyman, starring Asa Butterfield, Jack Scanlon, David Thewlis, and Vera Farmiga. It is based on the book of the same name by Irish novelist John Boyne. Set during World War II, a story seen through the innocent eyes of Bruno, the eight-year-old son of the commandant at a concentration camp, whose forbidden friendship with a Jewish boy on the other side of the camp fence has startling and unexpected consequences. It is one of the most moving and remarkable films about childhood I’ve ever seen. The setting of The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas is as grim as it gets, but the perspective is a magical piece of cinema.
Bruno is the eight-year-old son of a Nazi officer, and the curious eyes and ears of Mark Herman’s gripping story. When his father is promoted from a desk job in Berlin to commanding a death camp in the middle of nowhere, Bruno can’t fathom the sudden frosty tension between his parents, or why he is forbidden to visit the strange “farm” with the electric fences.
There’s a Swallows and Amazons innocence about Bruno’s efforts to picklock these mysteries that cuts both ways. His secret friendship with an amiable and starving Jewish boy called Shmuel on the other side of the wire has the rhythm of a children’s adventure, spiked by unspeakable adult truths. The two boys exchange tokens, play draughts and struggle to understand the prejudices and propaganda that separate them.
It’s a beautifully balanced chamber piece. The cast is terrific. David Thewlis and Vera Farmiga are wonderfully icy as the overprotective parents whose lies about the death camp are as hollow as their marriage. Their stiflingly formal dinner parties for ambitious young officers and Nazi dignitaries have a habit of turning toxic at the drop of a fork.
The naive young son of a newly promoted Nazi officer moves with his family to a house adjacent to a death camp and makes an unlikely new friend, He’s just moved into an isolated house in the middle of nowhere, and eight-year-old Bruno feels imprisoned by his mother’s warnings never to venture beyond the garden’s high walls. And he’s captivated by the view from his bedroom window: a strange sort of farm, he thinks, where the workers seem to have jumped straight out of bed to work on the fields. His curiosity leads him through an open door and to a huge electric fence, behind which sits a boy of exactly the same age – but with an entirely different story to tell.
“We will remember them,” we profess religiously on at least an annual basis, but filmmakers have always been overawed by the sheer horror of the Holocaust. Some of the most respected – the likes of Spielberg and Polanski – have been brave or brazen enough to attempt to frame humanity’s greatest defeat. Why fictionalise a story in front of such mass slaughter? Said French director Claude Lanzmann, who brought us the nine-and-a-half-hour Holocaust documentary Shoah: “Fiction is a trangression. There is a certain degree of horror that cannot be transmitted.”
Step forward transgressor Mark Herman, celebrated writer-director of whimsical northern comedies Little Voice and Brassed Off. Supported by his regular backers, Disney subsidiary Miramax, Herman adapted the children’s best-seller ‘The Boy In The Striped Pyjamas’ by Irish writer John Boyne. They spared no time: the film started shooting just 15 months after the book’s publication. So what made them so sure that they could break one of cinema’s last taboos? Well, as the Holocaust generation dies off, Herman’s naive eight-year-old hero could be each and every one of us: the time, they feel, has come to be brave, to make sure that successive generations “never forget”.
The relationship between Asa Butterfield’s precocious Bruno and Jack Scanlon’s gloomy Shmuel is a gawky comedy of young manners. Despite moments of improbable whimsy, this is a hugely affecting film. Important, too. It engages with the complexity of the Holocaust in a language that can move children as profoundly as adults.
Realated sites links:
