Issue link: https://maltatoday.uberflip.com/i/1199625
8 maltatoday | SUNDAY • 12 JANUARY 2020 FILM FILM WITH the alarming rise of far-right sentiment sweeping across America and most of Europe, it falls to both protest movements and art to give us some respite from the mess, perhaps even offering some form of tangible resistance along the way. But while marches, petitions and social media outrage does its standard rigmarole, with memes and endless threads of accusation and counter-ac- cusation littering our digital lives, we become accustomed to a quick consumption mod- el of activism, forgetting that while art moves at a slower pace, it may in the end offer a more rounded experience of what we're after. The German box office hit 'Look Who's Back' (2015), di- rected by David Wnendt from an equally successful novel by Timur Vermes, posited a sce- nario where Adolf Hitler (Oli- ver Masucci) is transported into our present world, grad- ually working his way back up the social, cultural and politi- cal hegemony of contempo- rary Germany. We chuckled along as this bumbling autocrat out of time negotiated his way through modern realities and mores, but it all came with a bit- ter aftertaste – a lot of it was funny because it was true, and Hitler's literal return made plausible is, in the end, no laughing matter, particularly when the film's closing lines, intoned by the former Fuhrer as he mentally rifles through present-day memes, are "I can work with this". New Zealand actor-director Taika Waititi chooses to tack- le this phenomenon in a simi- larly farcical register, though in JoJo Rabbit, some of the particulars are flipped: con- temporary attitudes and ver- nacular are transposed to the latter years of World War II, during which Germany insists on keeping troop morale high despite flagging prospects. Johannes (Roman Griffith Davis) is just one of the boys still attracted to the fervour of the Hitler Youth: the young man – whose father is absent, supposedly fighting in Italy – even hallucinates his own personal Hitler (Taika Waititi himself) to motivate him as he heads to boot camp, much to the chagrin of his sceptical (and secretly seditious) moth- er, Rosie (Scarlett Johansson). In fact, Rosie has done the unthinkable, by stowing away a young Jewish escapee, the teenage girl Elsa (Thomasin McKenzie) into her home, with whom Johannes now has to come to some form of peaceful co-existence, learn- ing the true facts of the war in particular, and life in general, along the way. Waititi has certainly come a long way since his involve- ment with the cult Kiwi com- edy troupe The Flight of the Conchords, and his second feature Boy (2010). While the vampire mockumentary What We Do in the Shadows (2014) endeared him to audiences far and wide, it was his helming of Marvel Studios blockbuster Thor: Ragnarok (2017) that really made him a household name, and which arguably allowed for a mildly daring feature like JoJo Rabbit to ac- cumulate the kind of studio goodwill and starpower that it had in the end (Sam Rockwell, Rebel Wilson, Stephen Mer- chant and Alfie Allen round off a healthy ensemble cast). Adapted by Waititi from Christine Leunens' novel Caging Skies, it eases into its concept with a heartfelt back- bone. Johannes is somewhat insuf- ferable in his right-wing fer- vour, but we also recognise him as a tragically misguided young soul, and one of the few lucky enough to have access to some form of redemption through Elsa, played with del- Taika Waititi's Hitler Youth comedy is a brazen tonic in these tough times, and an excellent showcase for all involved Teodor Reljic Defenestrate the Hitler inside yourself