Divided We Fall

Jan Hrebejk's film about wartime loyalties and compromises is pitched as a comedy, but it's the sort in which the laughs could almost be mistaken for gasps of dismay. Divided We Fall is comedy that gives you a jolt, and makes you wonder whether it might be more relaxing to watch tragedy instead. Its looming backdrop is the Holocaust, something which begins as a rumour ("They say that it's OK at Theresienstadt") and then grips as a terrible everyday fact. If you're thinking Life is Beautiful, think again: this has a compassion and wit that would put clown prince Benigni to shame.

It begins in innocence, as a car stops on a Czech country lane in 1937 and three men get out to relieve themselves. The youngest of them is David Wiener (Csongor Kassai), diffident son of a Jewish factory owner; the two older men are his chauffeur Horst (Jaroslav Dusek) and the company manager Josef Cizek (Boleslav Polivka). The story then leapfrogs a couple of times until it settles in the uncertain days of 1943. The small Czech town where they live is under Nazi occupation, and status has been inverted: the Wieners have been deported and their property carved up; one-time minion Horst, now a collaborator right down to his Hitler moustache, lords it at the table of his former boss Josef and his wife Marie (Anna Siskova). Horst's idea of a joke is to bang on the couple's door and yell, "Open up – Gestapo!"

The story, written by Petr Jarchovsky, concerns a desperate act of heroism. David, having escaped from the camps, throws himself on the mercy of Josef and Marie, who fret enough as it is over the suckling pig that's hanging in the pantry – hoarding is a serious offence under the occupation. Now they must choose whether to harbour a Jew, knowing that discovery will mean death not just for them but the whole street. "This isn't a roadside inn for fugitives", Josef whispers to Marie (there's a lot of whispering in this movie), a conversation which Hrebejk films from above, with the pig's carcass lying porkily across the kitchen table. Marie, a devout Catholic, insists on taking him in. Josef, a decent but querulous man, resents David's intrusion not just because it's dangerous – it's also extremely inconvenient. Even if his conscience compels him to hide David in the kitchen bolt-hole, he's not going to let him have his favourite blanket as well. Heroism, like the truth, is rarely pure, and never simple.

Jarchovsky's screenplay turns into a giddy, palm-sweating farce about public and private faces. Horst is so puffed up with entitlement that he flirts openly with Marie, and to stop his constant visits to their apartment Josef decides that his safest course is to sign on with the local regime. This tars him very obviously with the Nazi brush, but it diverts suspicion from their home. Horst proves persistent, however, and having lured Marie to a picnic he tries to force himself on her. Her reaction (a kick in the balls) turns him vindictive, and a battle of wits is entrained as he tries to billet a Nazi official on the couple; to keep him out Marie has to get pregnant and thus claim the spare room for the baby. One problem – Josef is impotent. This is the point at which the film's religious allegory becomes hard to ignore: Marie and Josef, a childless couple, require a miracle birth to save them, and the only man who can possibly help is David, whose namesake once united the kingdom of Israel. Still, the film can't help pointing up the absurdity of a husband frantically cajoling a secret lodger into impregnating his wife: "Shall we remove the pictures?" he asks nervously, glancing up at the portrait of the Madonna and Child gazing down on the bed. Very considerate.

Hrebejk handles this galloping farce expertly, so expertly that it might be easy to ignore the real horror which hovers blackly in the distance. Yet a brief scene in which David recalls his own personal Calvary speaks volumes: in the concentration camp his sister was offered the position of kapo, but first had to prove her hardiness. The Nazi guards handed her a club, and told her to beat her parents to death. How to deal with such a memory? Naturally our hopes for retribution focus upon the strutting collaborator Horst, yet Jaroslav Dusek's performance makes something oddly pitiable of the man; his abrasive camaraderie is turned up high to muffle the keenings of guilt. As Josef, Boleslav Polivka is a marvel of awkwardness, only too aware that his sham allegiance to the Nazis is digging his own grave with the townsfolk. There's a fine scene in which he begs the local schoolteacher not to think him a collaborator – at which point a car drives past and the Nazi commander (whom he once did a small favour) hails Josef as his "friend" and offers him a lift. Anna Siskova as Marie is a lovely mixture of slyness and sweetness, reverently polishing her religious portraits yet always alert to practical emergencies – and she plays farce superbly.

As the film enters its ironic endgame, the director of photography Jan Malir makes his camera shudder and blur, as if it too were finally buckling under the strain of fear and suspicion. The end of the occupation, with its accounting of various bad Czechs, is as tense in its way as the Nazi stranglehold. In many war movies, death and annihilation are dwelt upon because they are overpowering truths. But survival is a truth, too, and Divided We Fall offers a stirring and irresistible comic witness to it. It's a fantastic movie.