An arguably unromantic portrayal of anti-Semitic policies in Czechoslovakia on the eve of 1942, The Shop on Main Street, directed by Ján Kadár and Elmar Klos, is a film about the Holocaust shot in the Slovakian language with occasional lines in Yiddish. In the spirit of emotional affect invoked by the essence of the Holocaust, my personal dissatisfaction with this film is the bias of the response that follows.
The opening shot begins with a stork landing on the roof of a building. An eerie disjointed orchestra plays as the god-like camera lens tilts down, looking onto the bustling town below. Here, the directors introduce the forthcoming perversity that gradually materializes throughout the duration of the film. The omnipresent camera watching from the heavens offers a sense of fatality befalling the happy town. We are introduced to modest Brtko, his faithful dog Esens, his nagging wife, and their scant means of life. Looming in the background of the film is the ongoing construction of an ugly white pyramid-shaped tower, no taller than a three-story building, bearing what looks like the Cross of Lorraine or the motif of Slovakia's coat of arms and referred to colloquially by the townspeople as Babylon, or by the Nazi-ophiles as the eternal monument that shines on (because of the flashy spot-lights attached to it). Again, the cadence of looming evil accents the action.
The Brtko house welcomes guests for an indulgent evening of expensive food and way-too-much alcohol, with the theory that any horrific or harsh past (economic suffering, or perhaps anxieties caused by fearing, or wiping out, the Jewish neighbors); it can all be drowned in a sea of rum. Kadár and Klos condition us to dislike Brtko's wife. Evelyn Brtko, after having been a little materialistic and domineering towards her kind-of-lazy husband, flirts with the brother in law. Later, the questionable Evelyn Brtko exposes her ugliness with a pernicious anti-Semitic comment directed towards the sweet old widow with rheumatism and delusions of security. Ah, hah!, we say as Kadar and Klos validate our intuition. (I admit, I wallowed in my vanity a little bit because this film makes me feel as clever as I'd like to think I am.)
A little on Mrs. Lautmann, the old Jewish shopkeeper. Our sympathies are clearly furrowed towards her action. She is motherly and generous, despite her poverty, towards Brtko, who is commissioned by Slovakia's Nazi puppet regime to take over her shop since she would be soon relocated to a camp where she will presumably perish. To twist the knife even more, her body is weakened because of old age, she is devout in her faith and traditions, occasionally speaking, singing, or reading religious texts in Yiddish, her shop's stock is nearly gone, she tells nostalgic stories of her happy childhood, all of her family is dead or far away, and furthermore, she thinks she's inherited money from her deceased husband but really the Jewish congregation secretly fundraises to support her.
Internment camp. A group in the internment camp. In the front stands Zoli, the famous dwarf clown of Budapest. More photographs documenting the Holocaust in Hungary can be found here.
Kadar briefly alludes to the dark aspects of modernity with the character, Piti Batchi. This quirky character feels a bit like a novelty as we are first introduced to the little energetic Piti Batchi (Even his name is fun to say, I jokingly think, in any language). This charming man's business is later replaced by the installation of a loud speaker. He then is left with nothing but his charm; turning him into the novelty our suspicion anticipated. How cruel to victimize the little guy, we (are supposed to) say. As the tower is nearing its completion, more and more cruelty is exposed in the town which prepares us for the concluding tragedy we should be shocked by (so much so that we might tell all of our friends). Another example is the moment Brtko strolls through the town on a beautiful day. He dons the gifted hat from Mrs. Lautmann. The anti-Semitic passerbys apparently recognize something Jewish about the hat and stare at Brtko with disgust. Antisemitism is infecting the town like a contagious disease.
Alcohol comes back into play as Brtko tries to protect our innocent Jewess, Mrs. Lautmann, who is oblivious to the congregation of Nazi-ophiles and cheering crowds outside her shop door. It's only when Brtko is drunk beyond coherence that Mrs. Lautmann, thinking aloud, gasps pogram, a Yiddish word referring to the violent raids of Jewish homes. Flip-flopping between saving Mrs. Lautmann at all costs and loosing hope, resorting to a it's either me or her attitude, the defeated victim of the system, Brtko, hangs himself (with the rope that clued us in at the beginning of the film), following the ambiguous death of the old woman. Perhaps killing her was the only way Brtko could protect her from the horrifying camps, but it is ultimately unclear whether she died from health failure or directly by the very hand of Brtko. At this point, the film remains as ambivalent about her opportunity for salvation as we are, with a slight bias for Brtko's nihilistic side.
The directors restore our hope by offering an idealized release from the classic pity and terror scene he's contrived for us. A formally dressed Brtko and a healthy looking Mrs. Lautmann peacefully ride together on a white horse-drawn carriage. The lens distorts the hard edges of reality and we get the sense that they are in somebody's dream or heaven. A soothsaying Mrs. Lautmann converses with Brtko through voice over suggesting that they have a telepathic connection or that the limits of human communication are overcome in this mystical place, whatever it may be. The directors redeem us with hope and a pseudo-lesson in universal sorrows in connection with the root of all evil: fear. The Shop on Main Street is heart wrenching, but predictable. However, it successfully sells itself as a tragic film capitalizing on an immeasurably horrific historical moment. I don't blame him, I can imagine how hard is is to sell a film that's made in a marginalized language. I, too, might focus my creativity on getting my film to the shop on mainstream.
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