For most of his life, Jakob has been searching. As a young boy in Poland in 1942, Jakob watched from behind a fake wall as Nazi soldiers shot his parents dead and dragged his sister Bella away screaming. He never saw her again.
So begins the story of Fugitive Pieces, written and directed by Jeremy Podeswa and based upon Anne Michaels’ novel of the same name, which screens at the Seattle International Film Festival on Sat., June 14.
As soon as the shooting stops, Jakob, played with a silent grace by Robbie Kay, is on the run, on the search for his beloved Bella. He goes as far as his legs will take him, collapsing just short of an archaeological dig. One of the men, a professor named Athos Roussos (Rade Serbedzija), spots the unconscious boy and rescues him, returning to an island in Athos’ native Greece.
But life is not all wonderful in Greece for a lonely middle-aged man and a lost Jewish boy. The Nazis have arrived on the island as well, so while neighbors take pity — enough so that one beneficent woman loses her life for standing up to her occupiers — both godfather and son must live in hiding.
Upon war’s end, the two uproot themselves to Toronto, where Athos has accepted a teaching job. It’s in Canada where Jakob comes of age, spending his days with Athos and the family of fellow survivors who live across the hall. Where Europe was a place of constant turmoil, nothing changes in Canada — not the apartment, not the relationship between the two men, not the constant searching for Bella.
Toronto is portrayed as dark, cold, and perhaps even more imposing than Jakob’s native Poland. But it’s where Jakob (played as an adult by the intense, forlorn Stephen Dillane) has spent spends most of his life and feeds his funereal outlook on life: his career as a writer from the point, as a child, when Athos gives him a pencil and journal and tells him to write his experiences; his obsession in finding obscure details from nearly every righteous gentile he can find, always in search of his sister; the destruction of his marriage to a woman who can’t understand why he closes his life to her.
But then everything does change. Jakob’s recurring dream about his sister, from which he continually wakes before she can leave him her message, finally tells him to let go of her, to take control of his own life — as he lies next to the beautiful Michaela (acclaimed Israeli actress Ayelet Zurer), the daughter of a Russian soldier. But it’s where Jakob is allowed to experience happiness that Fugitive Pieces begins to fall apart. I half expected Jakob to recognize a samovar Michaela was using to serve him tea as one his family had lost in the raid on their home — that would have made things interesting — but instead the film turns sentimental, with, suffice it to say, the two leaving dreary Toronto to return to sunny Greece.
And from there, it’s the viewers who are left to suffer, as Jakob’s longing for a child, something we’d not been privy to before this point, creates an unnecessary subplot.
Fugitive Pieces, until Michaela enters, was done beautifully: wonderful cinematography, wonderfully sensitive portrayals from the cast, an affecting story. But one question nagged me throughout that offered answers, but never satisfactorily: Why did Athos go to such pains to rescue this Jewish boy, who, had he been caught, most certainly would have cost him his own life? Podeswa does a mostly admirable job of adapting Michaels’ story, but something, somewhere got lost in translation.