ScreenWize

With Bond’s action to the left of you and Baz’s epic to the right, you might want to take a dip into this thoughtful and intimate portrait of a man slowly warming to the beauty of life as he shakes off the ghosts of a family lost in the Holocaust.

Based on an award-winning novel by Canadian poet, Anne Michaels, Fugitive Pieces opens with Jakob – a small boy (Robbie Kay) - hiding in a house in Poland watching secretly as his family is dragged away by barely-seen Nazi soldiers. The moment is forever etched in the young boy’s mind, along with a handful of warmer memories of childhood – playing piano with his sister Bella & cooking with his mother.

When the soldiers are gone, Jakob is rescued by a Greek archeologist Athos (Rade Serbedzija) working on a nearby dig, and the two escape to the Greek Islands and then - after the war - emigrate to Canada. Encouraged by Athos to put pen to paper, Jakob grows up to become a solitary and insightful writer, and the story unfolds as fragments from Jakob’s diary and his memory collide with the intricacies of his new life. Above all else, Jakob is searching for a release from the despair of not knowing what happened to his family.

Director Jeremy Podeswa – who’s worked on a swag on high quality television drama’s like Carnivale and Six Feet Under - carefully crafted the adaptation of this story, and manages to maintain a deep sense of longing and a gentle unfolding of Jakob’s predicament, despite the span and scope of the narrative, which shifts from wartime Europe to post-war Toronto to the idyllic and peaceful Greek Islands. The cast – with Stephen Dillane playing the adult Jakob and Rosamund Pike his Canadian wife Alex – are flawless. Serbedzija’s loving portrayal of the man who saves the young Jakob is particularly mesmerizing – adding much weight to the film’s core theme of memory.

You can sense that Podeswa – who’s own father was the only one of his family to survive the Nazi concentration camps – has made this film with real care. It’s poetic and thoughtful without ever losing sight of the importance of the many relationships that surround Jakob on his journey in search of peace.

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Filed Under: Reviews by Simon