Take One (Jul 1978)

FILM REVIEWS MADAME ROSA Directed by Moshe Mizrahi An Atlantic Release of a Lira Film production. Direction and Screenplay (based on the Emile Ajar book): Moshe Mizrahi. Executive producers: Raymond Danon, Roland Girard and Jean Bolvary. Photography: Nestor Almendros. Cast: Simone Signoret, Samy Ben Youb, Claude Dauphin, Costa Gavras, Michal Bat-Adam. Madame Rosa (Simone Signoret), retired prostitute, Auschwitz survivor, frumpy and painted, wheezes up the six flights to her dingy apartment in Paris’ Belleville district. The stairs and hallways are alive with the building’s other tenants: Arabs, Africans, young, old. Everyone greets Madame Rosa by name. Outside her apartment door are assembled the prostitutes’ children whom she takes care of: blacks, Vietnamese, Arabs, one Jewish boy in yarmulke and ritual fringes. Already you sense it: something is wrong with this film. What's wrong is that it is built on stereotypes and oversimplification. To breathe the thought, let alone write it, is to feel like a traitor. Hasn’t Madame Rosa won not only the Oscar for Best Foreign Film, but also the French equivalent, the César, for Signoret’s truly firsttate performance? Is it not based on Emile Ajar’s Goncourt Prize-winning novel? Isn’t Nestor Almendros’ photography magnificent, likewise the settings, and most of the performances? The answer to all these questions is yes. It’s also true that Egyptianborn Israeli director, Moshe Mizrahi, (I Love You Rosa, The House on Chelouche Street) has his heart in the right place: but it isn’t enough. Madame Rosa’s favorite foster child is 14-year-old Momo (short for Mohammed). Their love is mutual: Momo does what he can to augment Madame Rosa’s foundering finances and to look out for her failing health, while she in turn tries to protect him from the ugly truth that his father murdered his mother, and to see that he is brought up an Arab. When finally her death is near, he takes her to her secret ‘‘Jewish’’ room, where, though an avowed atheist, she dies saying the Shema, the most sacred of Jewish prayers, in front of the menorah. Everybody loves Madame Rosa: the transvestite prostitute downstairs who offers Momo a home when Rosa’s health fails; Amedée, the pink-suited gangster who offers her ‘‘protection’’; the sturdy young Arabs who carry her to a picnic. In return, Madame Rosa, the quintessential (ex-)prostitute with a heart of gold, loves everybody: she sends her black foster-child to visit other black people, so that he’ll be able to ‘relate?’ when he’s grown; she provides (presumably) kosher fare for the orthodox foster-child. When not implausible, these 12 Simone Signoret plays Madame Rosa—the quintessential (ex)prostitute with a heart of gold. sensitivities and actions seem too modern, too exquisite. More offensive yet:are the young couple who provide the happy ending. Nadine (Michal Bat Adam), a film editor, shows Momo the magic of making time run backwards on the Moviola. Her husband, Ramon (Costa-Gavras), take down Momo’s story on his tape recorder. The couple are meant to seem hip and sympathetic; instead they come off as plastic and insensitive (I kept waiting for Momo to kick Ramon’s tape recorder into the next studio). Madame Rosa’s Jewishness is emphasized by her repeated dropping of Yiddish expressions, by her recollections of Auschwitz, and, in case we should have missed the point, by a close-up of the number tattooed on her arm. Yet Momo, the love of her old age, is an Arab. The lesson is clear: love and international understanding are possible, and can prevent a second Auschwitz, Again, just in case we miss the lesson, a few bits of dialogue reinforce it: Madame Rosa, to her physician, Dr. Katz (Claude Dauphin): As an Arab, he may have syphilis. Dr. Katz: It's because of rumors like that that we had Auschwitz. Again: Momo: How do you know I’m Arab, and not Jewish like you? Madame Rosa: Anyway, Jews and Arabs are alike. That’s why they’re fighting. These home-spun aphorisms have the ring of truth, but they are mo¢ truth. Auschwitz —the shorthand term currently popular to symbolize the Nazi extermination of Jews— was mot caused simply by ‘‘rumors like that.’” And, though Arabs and Jews are alike in some ways—they’re both Semitic peoples, for instance—that is mot ‘‘why they’re fighting.’’ A film about Jews and Arabs, which attempts to relate ‘‘Auschwitz’’ to contemporary problems, needs to be based on truth, not on platitude and wishful thinking. The love of Rosa and Momo, Jew and Arab, is touching and beautiful; but it won’t bring peace to the Middle East. What’s most distressing is that Madame Rosa is only one of a spate of Holocaust or . post-Holocaust works, none of which presents a humanly plausible view of the events and their participants. The television mini-series, ‘‘Holocaust,’’ is the easiest to censure for its Hollywoodization, its wedding-in-white in the middle of the partisan encampment, its concentration camp uniforms fresh from the dry cleaners. Yet ‘‘Holocaust’’ is only the crassest, most overt example of the falseness underlying the other works. Joseph Losey’s Mr. Klein, for instance, for all its chill exterior, hides a heart of Kitsch. Its titillation and mystification, the implausibility of the central character, make Madame Rosa look straightforward melodrama—which after all it is. How, then, film the Holocaust? Perhaps one has to go to the Czech films of the 60s—Zbynék Brynych’s The Fifth Horseman ts Fear, Jan Kadar and Elmar Klos’ The Shop on Main Street—and to Sidney Lumet’s The Pawnbroker, for lessons about the treatment of this delicate, near-impossible subject. Above all, one must adhere scrupulously to the truth, both in fact and in spirit. Not an easy task, but a necessary one. Harriet Polt Harriet Poltts a film critic and a teacher of English and Jewish Studies, living in Berkeley, California.