‘My Neighbor Adolf’ Review: An Unlikely Friendship

It’s tough to inform whether or not Russian-Israeli filmmaker Leon Prudovsky’s My Neighbor Adolf, a high-concept dramedy that tackles Holocaust trauma within the uneasily mixed flavors of slapstick sitcom and Hitchcockian suspense movie, is meant to problem or add to the style of Holokitsch. That the movie’s leads, David Hayman and the late Udo Kier, have appeared in some doubtful cinematic reenactments of Nazi atrocities (most notably The Boy within the Striped Pyjamas and Werewolf Ladies of the SS, respectively) solely deepens the query.

Marek Polsky (Hayman) is a loss of life camp survivor dwelling out the postwar years within the mountains of Colombia. He passes his days in paranoid isolation, tending to his beloved rose backyard—a reminder of his murdered household—and fixing chess puzzles. In the future, shortly after the Mossad’s abduction of Adolf Eichmann from Argentina makes worldwide headlines, Herman Herzog (Kier), a mysterious German with a cadre of goose-stepping associates and a ardour for canines and panorama artistry, strikes in subsequent door and desecrates Marek’s backyard.

Marek convinces himself that Herzog is none apart from Adolf Hitler, whom he claims to have as soon as locked eyes with on the 1934 World Chess Championship. When he brings his concept to the Israeli consulate in Bogota, although, the workers snicker off this frail, fearful, Yiddish-speaking Jew. His paranoia solely deepened, he thus embarks on an obsessive mission to spy on and (by way of a shared love of chess) befriend his new neighbor, all to seek out proof of his suspicions.

Prudovsky directly wrings this premise for whimsical absurdism and slow-burn suspense, on either side vulgarizing the reminiscence of the Holocaust. In a single lane are mocking string-and-woodwind musical cues (with the occasional navy snare drum) and situations revolving round wacky deceptions and bungled spying makes an attempt. (Poop, pee, and testicle jokes are considerable.) Sitting proper subsequent to this are the weary, haunted gravitas of the central performances and budget-friendly aesthetic pastiche of Holocaust cinema. Cinematographer Radek Ladczuk’s grim, desaturated colour palette, along with the various vocabulary of flat frontal-plane compositions, anxious monitoring pictures, and woozy handheld close-ups, place the movie firmly in dialog with the final three many years of status Nazi genocide reenactments.

The broad comedy beats are largely excruciating, until one finds bodily excretions or screaming alte kakers inherently riotous, however nor are they outre sufficient of their tastelessness to warrant comparisons to a gonzo sacrilege like Jerry Lewis’s The Day the Clown Cried. At its finest, My Neighbor Adolf makes use of the quilt of dangerous style to smuggle in some actually thorny thematic angles: a pronounced ambivalence concerning the Israeli state’s relationship with Holocaust survivors and the Jewish diaspora alongside its foundational self-image as the nice avenger; the prospect of forgiving a Nazi; and the query of when Jewish fears of antisemitism are and aren’t justified. But it surely doesn’t push arduous sufficient on any of those to be correctly confrontational, settling as an alternative for simple sentimentality and imprecise homilies about empathy and individuality.

There’s modestly efficient suspense within the buildup of the is-he-or-isn’t-he thriller surrounding Herzog’s id, with the movie introducing new developments to tug the viewers’s suspicions in a single course after which the opposite at a gradual tempo, and complicating the emotional textures as Herzog’s relationship with Marek softens into sudden affection properly earlier than the thriller is resolved. It’s to the 2 leads’ nice credit score that we purchase any of this, as a result of their characters, as bluntly written by Prudovsky and Dmitri Malinsky, don’t rating many factors on plausibility or depth. However My Neighbor Adolf operates on a myopic scale by taking the route of sentimentality, resulting in a tidy decision unbefitting the gravitas of its material, which Prudovsky appears to be neither subtle nor crass sufficient to do justice.