Europa, Europa
Production Co.: Les Films du Losange/CCCFilmkunst
Executive Producers: Margaret Menegoz, Arthur Brauner
Screenplay: Agnieszka Holland, based on the autobiography of Solomon Perel
Photography: Jacek Petrycki (Eastmancolor)
Editors: Ewa Smal, Isabelle Lorente
Art director: Allan Starski
Sound: Elisabeth Mondi
Music: Zbigniew Preisner
Cast
As himself, today: Solomon Perel
Solomon Perel as a young man: Marco Hofschneider
Leni: Julie Delpy
Kellerman: Andre Wilms
Leni's mother: Hanna Labornaska
Inna Moisieuna: Delphine Forest
Pfeiffer: Jorg Schnass
Eric: Aschley Wanninger
Schultz: Klaus Kowatsch
Captain Von Lereneau: Hanns Zischler
Festivals: Toronto, 1990. San Francisco, Sydney, Vancouver, 1991.
This superb film by the Polish director Agnieszka Holland is based on the memoirs of Solomon Perel, a German Jew who spent much of the Second World War passing for an Aryan in an elite Hitler Youth academy. The movie dramatizes this almost inconceivable survival story with a surprisingly light touch. It bounds from one jaw-dropping episode to the next with the speed and unnerving neutrality of a picaresque adventure, and never pauses to judge its ambiguous hero; it’s content to let the ironies of his situation collect around him like reflections in dressing room mirrors. His family's flight from the Nazis begins in 1938, on the eve of his Bar Mitzvah. Solly (played by a remarkable young actor, Marco Hofschneider) lands first in Lodz, Poland, and then, in the Soviet Union, where he becomes a star pupil in a CommunistschooI. After the Wehrrnacht invades Russia and takes him prisoner, he reincarnates himself as an orphaned 'pure' German, an Aryan child wandering in the barbaric eastern wilderness. By the time he is initiated into the Hitler Youth, he has already run through several identities, and has proved himself capable of playing his roles with conviction and enthusiasm. We remain, however, constantly aware (as he is) of what his Nazi disguise conceals his circumcised penis, the irreversible and unambiguous sign of his identity as a Jew. Holland uses this physical evidence of Solly's Jewishness as the fulcrum of the movie's delicately balanced narrative and moral tensions.. Terence Rafferty, New Yorker 1/7/91
