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Charlotte O'Sullivan's rating
War story reduced to a soap in Fugitive Pieces
By
Charlotte O'Sullivan
29 May 2009
An adaptation of Anne Michaels’s prize-winning novel, Fugitive Pieces reduces the Holocaust and its aftermath to a cosy soap opera. Stephen Dillane is writer Jakob Beer, who can’t forget that his parents — and possibly his sister Bella (Nina Dobrev) — were killed by the Nazis in Poland. Wafting back and forth through time, we meet a cute, troubled urchin, a wise old man, a weeping blonde and a beaming brunette.
Beer eventually decides to divide his time between Canada and Greece. Come to Greece, you all but hear a sultry voice say, where all your yesterdays can become a tomorrow ...
The acting, in general, is excellent (only Rosamund Pike, as Beer’s uncomprehending first wife, looks a tad lost). Dillane is suitably sweet and rattled, Rade Serbedzija, as his mentor Athos, rumbles with integrity. But acting can’t save the film. Obviously a labour of love for Canadian director/scriptwriter Jeremy Podeswa, the project nevertheless lacks any singularity.
There’s no sense of poetry, no edge. The result is a highbrow Captain Corelli’s Mandolin.
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