21st April, 2009

DAVID ADAMS

The Boy In The Striped Pyjamas (M)

In a word: Wrenching

FRIENDS DESPITE THE FENCE: Jewish boy Shmuel (Jack Scanlon) meets Bruno (Asa Butterfield). "Deftly directed By Mark Hermon to make the most of small moments and beautifully shot to highlight period detail, it’s the personal scale of the film - and the seeming banality of the lives of those it features - which serves to magnify the horror of the times in which it is set."

It’s another film about the Holocaust but what sets this film apart from countless others on the subject is that this is a small scale story told almost completely through the eyes of an eight-year-old boy.

Bruno (played by Asa Butterfield) is the son of a high-ranking Nazi (played by David Thewlis) who lives in Berlin and like any boy of his age, goes about his life largely oblivious to the momentous events taking place around him.

But his life is irrevocably changed when his father, on party orders, takes his family - including his wife (played by Vera Farmiga), 13-year-old Gretel (played by Amber Beattie) and Bruno - to the country where he is made the commandant of a concentration camp.

The family soon settles into a new life of isolation with their contact with the outside world the children's Nazi-oriented tutor, their father’s minions and a man visiting from "the farm" - Bruno's term for the concentration camp - who works as a servant. While Gretel quickly becomes the model Nazi child, devoting herself to her skewed studies and becoming enamoured of one of her father's henchmen, Bruno, pining for his friends back in Berlin, finds himself drawn to "the farm" in his search for companionship.

Bruno soon meets one of the camp’s inmates - a Jewish boy called Shmuel (played by Jack Scanlon) who is of similar age - and despite the fence between them and the strict instructions Bruno is given not to go near the camp, their friendship blossoms.

Bruno’s father attempts to keep the details of what is going on in the camp secret from his family but it soon becomes obvious to his wife and eventually Bruno himself that there is much more to the farm than what they have been told.

Based on a book by John Boyne, The Boy In The Striped Pyjamas is an impressive and ultimately harrowing film. Deftly directed By Mark Hermon to make the most of small moments and beautifully shot to highlight period detail, it’s the personal scale of the film - and the seeming banality of the lives of those it features - which serves to magnify the horror of the times in which it is set.

While it can make for tough viewing, this is a film well worth your attention.

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