2 daughters search for Holocaust truths
Israeli director Avi Nesher has taken a real-life Holocaust memoir and transformed it into a mostly effective mixture of mystery and melodrama. Despite some cumbersome moments, the film delivers a tothe-point message about how the sins of the parents can be visited on the children.
The story, which starts in 1977, involves a Jerusalem family, although the opening scene is in West Berlin. Sephi ( Joy Rieger), a young composer who is singing with an Israeli choir, and her older sister, Nana (Nelly Tagar), are confronted after a performance by an older Polish woman who says their father committed murder during World War II.
Back home in Israel, Sephi and Nana begin to look deeper at the past of their martinet father, Baruch Milch (Doron Tavory) a gynecologist who survived the Holocaust but has never opened up about his wartime experiences. (The movie is based on the book “Can Heaven Be Void?,” Milch’s diaries edited by his elder daughter and published in 2003. Milch died in 1989.)
Baruch is angered by his daughters’ investigations but finally agrees to read to them from the diary he says he kept during the war. He no longer has the journal but tells them he can recall it from memory. The young women wonder if the diary is real. The story Baruch tells concerns his hiding from the Nazis in a cellar in Poland, a dark tale that’s fraught with moral complexity.
Nana turns out to be a leftist with intense feelings about Israeli policies, an attitude for which her father has no use at all.
And, while in Berlin, Sephi catches the eye of avant-garde composer Thomas (Rafael Stakowiak), a young man with a funereal demeanor who is the son of the woman who verbally assaulted the sisters. Thomas arranges to remain a part of Sephi’s life, though his true motives are hidden from us.
An assortment of other developments and revelations lead to an ending with a redemptive feeling, including a performance in Poland of Sephi’s composition based on her father’s memoirs. In getting there, Nesher hasn’t been entirely able to avoid a sense of heavy-handedness, which is compounded by a fair number of subplots, including one involving Nana’s health.
Rieger and Tagar acquit themselves well, while some of the other actors lay it on thick. The filmmaking by Nesher (“The Matchmaker”) is decidedly old-school, long on emotionalism and short on finesse, which may be an obstacle for some viewers.
Still, the movie has something important to say, and Nesher — the son of Holocaust survivors — intends to elaborate on it. He has planned “Past Life” to be the first in a trilogy with similar themes.