Shoshana – Film Review
by Hugh Maguire

Director – Michael Winterbottom
Writers – Laurence Coriat, Paul Viragh, Michael Winterbottom
Stars – Douglas Booth, Irina Starshenbaum, Harry Melling

“Follows two Brit police officers Thomas Wilkin and Geoffrey Morton in their hunt for charismatic poet and Zionist freedom fighter Avraham Stern, who was plotting to evict British authorities.”

It is not so much that the film is timely but can a film release ever have been so timed to complement current events and widespread tragedy and suffering.  The clash of creeds and cultures, Palestinian and Israeli, Muslim and Jewish, is the background to this gripping account of a doomed love affair.  Diverse cultural traditions have examples in their histories and cultures of frustrated love affair narratives.  Sometimes Cinderella does indeed get her prince, but Romeo and Juliet and the omnipresent scythe of an ever-present spirit of death are perhaps more common.

Essentially we are dealing with a Tel Aviv-based frustrated love narrative of sorts, based on real historical figures, where a first-generation Zionist settler, the real-life Ukrainian Shoshana Borochov (1912-2004), falls in love with an improbably good-looking English police detective, during the period of the British mandate in Palestine.  In real life, she was married to him for 11 years.  Their sometimes passionate but doomed love affair is set against the background of the swirling political events and agitations leading up to the declaration of the State of Israel (1948), and the wider world conflicts of the 1930s and World War II.  This familiar narrative arc is supported by an extraordinary selection of historic newsreel footage punctuating the film.  This material is fascinating. It provides a historical scaffolding for the film’s narrative, all the more pointed with the contrast between the Mediterranean colour of the main film with the black and white newsreel.  The same newsreel not only allows for the story to progress through defined time periods but provides compelling insights into how different cultural and religious groups were perceived by each other and of course by their British overlords.  These interventions serve to highlight the inordinate complexity of the historical and current political landscape, essentially a mess.   It is also a sobering reminder of the supercilious way colonial administrators perceived their charges.  The implication is that the ruthless policing and control methods exercised by the British informed subsequent policing in the new state.  The choice of language alone seems antediluvian, but may serve as a useful reminder to contemporary viewers, so easily offended by language, as to what genuinely offensive language may sound like,

The film manages to look stylish throughout despite the background tensions and horror. Tel Aviv has a celebrated Bauhaus architecture; the architects fleeing Germany and elsewhere brought their innovative tastes and talents with them.  Whether a British police detective surrounded himself with the latest (and expensive) Eileen Gray side tables is perhaps debatable!