CRITICS' PICKS

L.A. Weekly
Author: Ella Taylor
Date: Jun 21, 2006

If you see only seven films at this year’s LAFF, make it these:

INHERITANCE (Germany/Poland/USA) Imagine watching Schindler’s List if you’re Monika Hertwig, the daughter of Amon Goeth, the monstrous concentration-camp commandant portrayed by Ralph Fiennes and hanged by the Poles when Hertwig was a year old. Now imagine watching the movie if you’re Helen Jonas-Rosenzweig, the Jewish housemaid Goeth savaged in his fancy villa overlooking the Plaszow camp in Poland, where he had a personal hand in the deaths of thousands of Jews. James Moll, who has worked extensively with the Shoah Foundation, brought the two women together at the memorial to the former camp. There’s every reason to be leery of such contrivance, and had the two women fallen on one another’s necks and vowed to be sisters for life, I’d have thrown up. But each, in her different way, brings strength, suffering, rage and finally a kind of damaged dignity to the encounter, and so transcends the artifice. At 60, Hertwig looks older and more ravaged than Jonas-Rosenzweig — a bright, humane and put-together matron now living in the United States — and we come to learn why. Wisely, neither Hertwig nor Moll tries to equate her suffering to that of the camp survivor, but this is undoubtedly Monika’s story and, by extension, that of other children of perpetrators. Interestingly, Hertwig’s most potent anger is reserved for her mother, a passive collaborator and obstinate keeper of silence about the family’s past. The film’s truth-shall-set-you-free message may be glib — I didn’t buy the assertion of closure for either woman — but we come to understand that the Holocaust continues to spawn all kinds of victims. (Majestic Crest, Sun., June 25, 2:15 p.m.; Italian Cultural Institute, Tues., June 27, 5 p.m.; Sunset 5, Thurs., June 29, 7:30 p.m.)

-- Ella Taylor, L.A. Weekly Film Critic