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Remember when Woody Allen discovered the cinematic beauty of Europe? That’s what we’re dealing with here. The quaint, cobbled streets of Europe, with their picturesque, romantic buildings, which, otherwise seen, might evoke misery and poverty. Yet, through the right lens and a few carefully placed hanging flower baskets, these images are transformed, adding colour and hope as a sentimental story unfolds.
For his second feature film, Jesse Eisenberg has taken this easy route, featuring himself (again) alongside his on-screen alter ego, Kieran Culkin. By weaving in the atrocities suffered by the Jewish people in Poland, Eisenberg (coming from a Jewish Polish family tree) has crafted a narrative with personal resonance—a choice that, apparently, permits him the references and justifies his attempt to tackle such a heavy subject.
In ‘A Real Pain,’ cousins David and Benji embark on a journey from America to Poland to explore Jewish history on a touristic ride and visit their grandmother’s childhood home. From the outset, we’re shown—and repeatedly reminded—that the two have drifted apart. David leads a relatively content family life, while Benji is adrift, seemingly doing nothing with his time. For a significant amount of shot time, we follow their awkward interactions, complete with heaps of twitching facial expressions, hunched postures, and hands perpetually shoved into pockets. We get it: they are both misfits.
It’s an image Jesse Eisenberg has established quite well, even from his first screen appearance. The image of a socially awkward guy, here doubled. Which made me severely question what is the use of taking so much film time to repeat the same point. Because, really, it is one point and the same. By the time the film finished, both David and Benji are exactly where they’ve started from. Two estranged relatives, holding on to a pregiven connection but still not acknowledging how distant they are between them. No revelation is allowed to the audience, and no conclusion is destined for the characters.
If we can just leave behind us the astonishingly dull circle this film draws in the life of the two characters, we get plenty space to ponder over the intentions of making this a film about the horrors housed in Auschwitz. I racked my brains, put on easygoing glasses, and tried the layback and enjoy method, but I could just not figure it out; why on earth someone (anyone) would casually shoot a concentration camp that carries heavy and painful stories dating already a good 80 years, put on some classical music records to dress the scene and present it to an audience as if it were just another cinematic backdrop? It’s an honest question: What are we meant to feel or think?
It’s a genuine question I struggle to answer. If you are to set a film in Europe, and you’re missing an emotional layer to it, try going through the news. I am certain you can pick up something that has enough drama roots and not (yet) enough emotional implications around it. I mean, Europe (and Poland in this case) can offer all the cinematic landscape opportunities for an American visitor to experience. Do you really have to take us where we’ve been before, only to play with shallow emotions? I cannot help but think about how generous and thoughtful and essential the approach of The Zone of Interest is.
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Anyhow and nevertheless, there is an interesting aspect that the film does hinge towards, albeit not actively. Transgenerational trauma and inherited suffering of pain (google it, it’s a thing). Benji, the black sheep of the family, has some random but epiphanous remarks that he shares with his fellow touring company in moments when they settle on historical points speaking of the Holocaust and all the ways tourism is evincing disrespect—the paradox really. But his overall social stance and attitude in life hinge towards an equally to his predecessor suffering individual that has travelled to honour. In case you’ve been wondering, this is the subject matter of ‘A Real Pain.’ Strangely, the inherited and ever-present nature of inner pain. Which, as you probably know by now, is not addressed, just mentioned, perhaps by chance.
The half star of the rating goes to the effort of making a film that has nothing really to offer, a vehicle of awareness over a dreadful part of history, which, to be fair, the casually addressed audience of such a film (being an easygoing indie) doesn’t often get challenged with.