A bleak period in history

THE SONG OF NAMES: PRODUCTION JOINS A NUMBER OF EMOTIVE HOLOCAUST DRAMAS

Film manages to spin a mystery while providing a canvas for classical music.

The Song of Names which hits the Boxoffice circuit this week, sees South African film industry icon Anant Singh serving as an executive producer of this engrossing, unpretentious, art-house production.

The production joins a number of emotive Holocaust dramas that have been produced over the years and this one, directed by François Girard, a French Canadian, of The Red Violin fame, will connect on a number of levels.

Not only does it revisit a bleak period in history, but manages to spin an intriguing mystery while providing a canvas for some beautiful classical music. It explores aspects of World War II, the Holocaust, Judaism and the escapade in 1951 of an arrogant nine-yearold Warsaw-born Jewish boy, Dovidl Rapoport (Luke Doyle).

Dovidl was a musical prodigy whose disappearance from London in 1951 just before a concert, and the search by his childhood English friend Martin, 35 years later, forms the core of the movie.

Tim Roth plays the adult version of Martin who undertakes a dogged search for his childhood friend seeking closure and answers to whatever happened to the boy with the “music from the gods” talent.

Martin, now married to Helen (Catherine McCormack), is a music educator and concert promoter like his late father (Stanley Townsend) who lost a fortune when the young Dovidl had failed to make the concert appearance.

The Song of Names tracks Martin’s 1986 search, updated in Tyneside, Warsaw and on to New York, with long flashbacks telling the story of how the two boys met and much of what led up to that infamous no-show Big Show in 1951. The adult Dovidl is played by Clive Owen, another fine British actor, his face now partly obscured by a thick beard.

The film is punctuated by a series of flashbacks which sum up the war years and Dovidl’s insistence on standing outside and watching the London Blitz because “It would have been like this” for his family in Warsaw.