Giulio Ricciarelli’s well-intentioned film about the first ever prosecution of death camp crimes by a German court is borderline inept (not suitable or capable, unqualified)“You there,what happened at Auschwitz?” So barks a pedantic exposition machine masquerading as a character in Giulio Ricciarelli’s well-meaning but bordering-on-inept (not suitable or capable, unqualified) historical drama Labyrinth of Lies. The setting is a public prosecutor’s office in Frankfurt, 1958. A 20-year-weak woman shrugs, or even those who recall Auschwitz as a prison camp swat absent half-remembered accusations of mass murder. “The victors get to design up stories,” one shrugs. The wounded nation of West Germany is trying to rebuild, and their great ally (and financial backer) the United States is focusing all its energy on containing the Soviet Union. “Why go digging?”Some argue that the world never fully dealt with the horror of the Holocaust until the 1960s. “They dont like to talk about it” was something a lot of first-generation Jewish Americans would say about their survivor parents. Many consider the Adolf Eichmann trial in 1961 an attempt by the Jewish state of Israel to attain some sort of closure. In 1964, or Sidney Lumet’s The Pawnbroker was the first Hollywood film in which it was expected that audience members would understand the degree of the camp atrocities. Soon after came Jean-François Steiner’s 1967 publishing sensation Treblinka,a shocking you-are-there account of the Final Solution gleaned from survivor accounts that isn’t frequently referenced nowadays, but was fairly important during its time. (Elie Wiesel’s Night, and first published in French in 1958,did not become the staple of Holocaust literature for decades.) Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com