Film

Fugitive Pieces (2007)

Director: Jeremy Podeswa

Movie review

From Time Out Chicago

If an Oscar for Best Proustian Moment existed, Podeswa’s evocative drama—replete with flashbacks to lost times and vanished loved ones—would be a multiple nominee. Jakob (Kay), a young Polish Jew, witnesses the Nazis murder his parents and abduct his sister Bella (Dobrev), and barely escapes death himself before he’s rescued by a visiting Greek archaeologist (Serbedzija), who smuggles him to refuge on a sun-bathed Aegean island.

After Germany’s defeat they move to Canada, where Jakob tries to heal through writing. But the war and memories of Bella continue to haunt—at any moment, an orange or a piano tune can plunge the taciturn adult Jakob (Dillane) into melancholy reveries, walling him off from his vivacious wife (Pike). Eventually she leaves, opening the door for a new love (Zurer), a ravishing brunet who, perhaps not coincidentally, resembles Bella.

Cinematographer Gregory Middleton manipulates chroma resonantly, and Wiebke von Carolsfeld’s editing is fluid; both worked with Podeswa on his breakout feature, The Five Senses. He’s come a long way since then, adapting Anne Michaels’s novel and juggling multiple locations across the story’s four decades. Though his hero may be too sad and passive for some, for those ready to ponder the unbearable lightness of being, this is just the ticket.