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"Edges of the Lord" (2001) (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0245090/)
Directed by Yurek Bogayevicz
Miramax Films
R / Germany:16
2001
Reviewed by a contributor 2004 October 24
If the MRQE(1) is any guide, this is one of the few English-language reviews of "Edges of the Lord" available on the Internet—three years after the movie's 2001 October release in Poland(2), and its 2001 November screening at the Polish Film Festival. "Edges of the Lord" will be screened again at the 6th Annual Polish Film Festival in 2005 April, in Los Angeles(3). There are all sorts of speculation about why this movie, whose u.$. distribution rights were bought by Miramax in 2000 October, is still available only on Brazilian DVD and pirated video. What's certain is that "Edges of the Lord," whose first-billed stars are Willem Dafoe and Haley Joel Osment, is unexpectedly not yet popular in the united $tates.
It's not that World War II entertainment productions are getting old with Euro-Amerikans. "Pearl Harbor" (2001), "Windtalkers" (2002) and the miniseries "Band of Brothers" (2001) are proof of this. Although "Edges of the Lord" doesn't readily fit into the Holocaust genre, movies depicting anti-Semitic genocide and relocation don't seem to be declining in popularity either: "Anne Frank: The Whole Story" (2001), "Jakob the Liar" (1999), "Life is Beautiful" (1997), "Out of the Ashes" (2003), and "The Pianist" (2002), for example.
Although few moviegoers will have seen a movie that so bluntly depicts anti-Semitic Poles, "Edges of the Lord" says nothing that is particularly new. It is well-known that Germany invaded Poland in 1939, and during the ensuing war, the Germans massively plundered and repressed the whole Polish population, not just the Jews. It is also true that while anti-Semitism was widespread in Poland before the Nazi Party even existed ("Edges of the Lord" does not depict this), only a very small minority of Poles actually collaborated with Germany in the relocation and genocide of Polish Jews. Other Poles, perhaps even moderately anti-Semitic Poles(4), aided Polish Jews.
What "Edges of the Lord" depicts is this dual aggression against Poland and Polish Jews, manifestations of anti-Semitism among Polish people, and some Catholic small peasant farmers and a Catholic priest (Willem Dafoe) helping the child of a Jewish couple to hide.
"City boy" Romek's (Haley Joel Osment) parents are obviously big-bourgeois. This seems to be a plot device to establish some kind of credible relationship between the Jewish couple and the peasant village. It isn't made clear whether any money changed hands before Romek is taken from Krakow to the village. The depiction of bourgeois Jews, in the absence of poor working Jews, in movies doesn't automatically equate to anti-Semitism, but this reviewer would take care to point out that the majority of Polish Jews were poorer than the average Pole even before the war began.(5)
Much of "Edges of the Lord" revolves around Romek's desire to preserve his Jewish identity and family history at the same time he must integrate with the Catholics in order not to be found out. Romek's identity is not just a neighborhood secret. It is a secret between himself, his host family, and the priest, and the rest of the village isn't supposed to know. It is even an accident that the youngest child Tolo (Liam Hess) knows.
For a movie that is apparently meant to reconcile Christians and Jews with each other, "Edges of the Lord" teaches extremely little, absolutely nothing, about Judaism. For example, Romek is never shown saying Jewish prayers. Instead, he is forced to say the "Hail Mary," and crucifixion and other Christian imagery, and passages from Bible scripture, are featured prominently in the movie.
"Edges" refers to the edges left by cutting out Communion wafers in a cookie-cutter fashion. Romek takes the edges to mean non-Christianity. So, they are relatively palatable to him whereas the consecrated wafers are not.
To historical materialists, there is nothing sacrosanct about different religions, "belief systems," "faith communities," religious denominations, or perpetuating social divisions that are ostensibly based on religion. However, refusing to take Communion might be a way to subjectively resist anti-Semitism(6). If that is what Romek persynally, subjectively gets out of declining to take Communion, then communists are not going to argue with that. Also, it would be ridiculous and criminally misleading to suggest that anti-Semitism would end if only Jewish people would try to stop practicing Judaism altogether. What must be combatted is not Judaism, but anti-Semitic ideology, which is inspired by national chauvinism and even revisionism(7).
Gender oppression
"You haven't gotten a good spanking in a long time." —Manka
It is interesting that it is a Roman Catholic priest who helps the Jewish couple to hide their son. This review is not going to get into the largely (but not exclusively) intra-religious debate over exactly how complicit some Catholic leaders were in German fascist repression and militarism, and the Holocaust. (By purposefully featuring a Catholic priest as a Holocaust rescuer, "Edges of the Lord" may be trying to counter the widespread perception of the Catholic Church leadership's complicity with the Nazi Party.) However much they differed in opinion on Nazism, these leaders were largely united in their opposition to communism. In this context, we have to ask how Romek came to identify with Judaism in the first place, why Tolo and the other village children are so susceptible to Christian indoctrination, etc. Tactically, it may be correct to value religious "diversity" (i.e., a large Roman Catholic majority, and Ashkenazi Jews on the other hand) when people are being assaulted, arrested and killed, but that does not mean that religion, and the inculcation of religious thinking among children, are above criticism or analysis.
In fact, how a child perceives themself religiously is correlated with their parent or guardian's religious identity, more so than with their neighborhood's or the religious demographics of the general population. The fact that a child is more likely to identify with their guardian's religion than not, isn't just an indictment of the notion of faith. It is a manifestation of the control of children by private individuals. Romek's dad (Marek Weglarski) can force Romek to hang from a closet bar and recite the "Hail Mary." Under patriarchy, however, a child typically cannot force an adult to do the same thing unless they carry with them the threat of physical force or violence. Romek's dad, mom (Edyta Jurecka) and Gniecio (Olaf Lubaszenko) can stuff Romek into a potato sack. Gender oppressors dictate the location and movement of children. Children-as-a-group will probably never be able to control the mobility of people older than them.
While it is conceivable that a minority of children financially benefit from wage discrimination against other children, particularly in the Third World, or obtain emotional and sexual benefits from the subordination of younger children or children who are gender or sexual minorities, children, as a whole, do not benefit from patriarchy. (MIM has spoken of a conceivable "child aristocracy" in a particular context: MCB52, 1995, "The Oppression of Children Under Patriarchy," http://www.prisoncensorship.info/archive/etext/mt/mt9child.html.) It is clear that Romek's affective attachment to his parents becomes debilitating, a hinderance to his ability to integrate with his new caretakers and peers even when his life depends on it. It is also evident that Romek wants to stay with his biological family even though it is against his own biological (survival) interests during the German occupation. We have to ask why it is that Romek was not allowed or encouraged to change his caretakers long before he is forced into Gniecio's potato sack, that is, before the problem gets to the point where it is a life-or-death issue.
The point is emphatically not that Romek could have evaded anti-Semitism by rejecting Judaism or denying his faith. The fact that Gniecio had to get Romek's family baptismal certificates to establish their fake Catholic identities is enough to prove this wrong. Instead, the issue is the subordination of children-as-a-group to gender oppressors and incipient/potential gender oppressors, and the sheer power that gender oppressors (anatomically female or male) have to dictate how, where and even when children live. Romek's parents do not go through all their trouble to save an anonymous child. They go through all their trouble to save their own child, with the prospect that they will all be reunited at some point in the future.(8) Romek simply is not consulted during any of this, or the movie takes his consent for granted or considers it to be irrelevant—we never see Romek's family planning how Romek will go into hiding. Romek seems resigned to practicing the "Hail Mary." He seems to be aware of what's going to happen to him. In any case, his wishes are effectively ignored by his parents.
In the real world, it is true that adults' consideration of children's desires, perceptions, or thoughts, rarely surpasses tokenism. On the other hand, it is hard to have anything other than tokenism when the majority of children can separate themselves from their caretakers, teachers, etc., who may or may not be actual gender oppressors, only by risking physical violence (e.g., a parent punitively assaulting their own child or imprisoning them in a room), rape (by a caretaker or another adult), starvation, or humiliation. Under patriarchy, relationships between adults and children are secured by many different threats of violence, stigmatization, or exclusion.
The patriarchal culture of emotional and sexual predation is so pervasive that pecking orders even appear among gender-oppressed people, for example, gender-oppressed oppressed nationalities and gender-oppressed people who are children. So, in "Edges of the Lord," a grrl (Ola Frycz) is cruised and sexually assaulted(9) by an older, physically stronger child (Chiril Vahonin). Actually, the grrl has to be knocked out first, almost by accident. So, this is not just a matter of the older child's sheer brawn.
To the movie's credit, "Edges of the Lord" illustrates how children, even under patriarchy, can take advantage of technology to augment their own physical strength with respect to older people. However, the children in "Edges of the Lord" lose their nerve after they handle the handgun, and sometimes, it is not clear whether they really have any increased freedom of movement at all. It may be just temporarily given to them by adults. Of course, just having a gun doesn't necessarily do anything to end patriarchy. It may only be a means of resistance.
"Edges of the Lord" says nothing particularly new or unexpected about children, families, or gender oppression. In this context, it is reinforcing the patriarchy and normalizing the specific practices of the patriarchy in imperialist countries such as Poland. Romek's affection for his parents is never interrogated. Similarly, Tolo's affection for the priest, who is an adult, and Tolo's neurotic attempts to emulate Jesus Christ (a Jew), are never explored outside the context of: "Look, even this little Catholic child empathizes with the Jews. Why can't you?"
It is possible that to end gender oppression forever, most typical current family configurations will have to disappear, or the characteristic aspects of families today will have to be delinked from each other. One of the bastions of patriarchy is how intimacy, affection, reproduction, sex, childcare, and infant dependency, are entangled with each other in complicated ways, in different types of families. Even if an abused or neglected child can leave their caretaker(s) and go to their grandmother or whomever is next most familiar, that is not enough to end the gender oppression of children as far as childcare. When Romek is kicked out, for example, he runs to Maria and her grandmother's place, but even this may not be the next best possible home for him. For one, Romek is unacquainted with Maria's grandmother. This is no insignificant point: in the absence of advanced gender line, family privacy and access to a limited pool of caretakers without any oversight or accountability to public criticism, form one of the strongest bases of children's oppression under patriarchy.
Genocide
In "Edges of the Lord," there is this whole thing about Romek looking "Aryan." There are several purposeful, lingering facial close-ups of Romek, who has blonde hair and blue eyes. In fact, many Jewish people had the same appearance. Presumably, this would allow Romek to better integrate with the Catholic Poles in the village, but Ela Kluba (Dorota Piasecka) annoyingly remarks that Romek has "nice, noble features." This remark probably has to do with Romek's dress and clean appearance, but Ela Kluba, Kluba (Andrzej Grabowski) and their son Pyra (Wojciech Smolarz) have darker, brown hair. Their other son Robal has a shaved head.
It happens that Ela Kluba's family includes all of the movie's main antagonists, all of whom commit crimes. If writers Yurek Bogayevicz and Philip Krupp are actually suggesting that anti-Semitism just "runs in the family," then they are wrong. Anti-Semitism has broader causes than children's mimicking their parents.
The grrl Maria "Magdalene" has brown eyes and brown hair and is depicted as being promiscuous and a temptress. This reviewer wonders whether this, along with the physical appearance of Pyra, Robal, etc., is another instance of "anatomical stigmata" (Stephen Jay Gould, 1996, The Mismeasure of Man, New York, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.), whereby innate criminality is falsely associated with certain physical characteristics. In this case, it is criminality that supposedly runs in the family. Perhaps more seriously (since depictions of diabolical or ugly criminals are so prevalent and normal in the movies), the characterization of Kluba and the rest of his family is a manifestation of anti-Polish stereotypes. At one point, obese Kluba is drunk, belligerent and takes swigs from a bottle. It turns out that, among other things, he's also a thief. It's almost as if "Edges of the Lord" is deploying these Amerikan and German anti-Polish stereotypes as a way of attacking anti-Semitic Poles. That would be a wrong way to criticize anti-Semitism.
Pyra, Robal and Vladek (Richard Banel), who is Gniecio and Manka's (Malgorzata Foremniak) oldest son, are all witness to lethal anti-Semitic brutality. While blond-haired, blue-eyed Vladek eventually comes to the aid of Romek (in a different, later scene), Pyra and Robal do not. In fact, they perpetrate violence against Romek. To the movie's credit, "Edges of the Lord" shows that just witnessing or observing anti-Semitic violence is not enough to end virulent anti-Semitism even at an individual level. It doesn't matter how many "Schindler's List's" (1993) and movies about Anne Frank(10) are made, without revolutionary theories of capitalism, imperialism and fascist imperialism, imperialist-country parasites are vacillating at best and prone to being anti-Semitic and otherwise racist.
Christian-Jewish relations
One thing that differentiates "Edges of the Lord" from other Holocaust rescue movies is its pronounced emphasis on respecting religious differences between Christians and Jews. "Respecting" because "Edges of the Lord" does not actually "celebrate" the differences—the movie fails to depict what is particular to Jewish religion; it just assumes that this particularity exists. The theme of post-Vatican II Christian-Jewish relations in movies is itself nothing new. Recently, there has been the movie "Stolen Summer" (2002), which deals with Catholic-Jewish relations and anti-Semitism in a contemporary (1976) North Amerikan context.
Disunity among imperialists is sometimes useful to the movements of exploited and oppressed people. Improved "Christian-Jewish relations," particularly in an Amerikan context, is sometimes an intentional or unintentional way to legitimize u.$. support for the imperialist country of Israel—a way to further Euro-Amerikan imperialist interests—in the eyes of the Christian majority in the united $tates(11). However, anti-Semitism is always reactionary and obscures the nature of capitalist and imperialist parasitism.
Rather than consolidate public opinion or religious opinion in a way that is offensive to the world's majority, exploited and oppressed people have come up with their own ways of combatting anti-Semitism. However, particularly if there are no alternatives, ruling-class declarations such as "Nostra Aetate"(12) ought to be supported to the extent that they are actually opposed to anti-Semitism.
It would be a ridiculous stretch to say that "Edges of the Lord," limited in distribution as it is, has actually encouraged inter-imperialist cooperation against oppressed nations. But clearly, the movie could have made its point without glorifying Christianity—and in an unnecessarily Christian-centric way that leaves religious Judaism completely invisible. Also, "Edges of the Lord" simply depicts some aspects of children's lives, but does not really get into how children are oppressed under patriarchy. And by complicating the story with Christian heroism, "Edges of the Lord" does not make its point about sympathetic non-Jews as strongly as, say, "Anne Frank: The Whole Story" (2001). "Edges of the Lord" deserves a neutral rating for making very little effort to change the status quo.
Finally, the intent behind making "Edges of the Lord" may have been to make an anti-genocide movie. If that was indeed the intent, then it might have been better to diversify and make a bigger-budget movie showing the relationship between imperialism and genocide, for example, in Algeria, Armenia, Japan, the Philippines, Rwanda, etc. This is certainly not a criticism of "Edges of the Lord" itself, but there is the danger of distorting the nature of imperialism if, in the prevailing movie culture, genocide is effectively attributed to only anti-Semitism or Nazism. That said, Polish-American director Yurek Bogayevicz probably had other motives for making a movie about Polish Holocaust rescuers.
Notes
1. Movie Review Query Engine, http://www.mrqe.com/
Actually, the New York Times has published an All Movie Guide review of "Edges," but Mark Deming strangely misrepresents the movie's basic factual content (http://movies2.nytimes.com/gst/movies/movie.html?v_id=248903). Is Gniecio a friend or only a sympathetic acquaintance? One or the other. Gniecio is part of the same "sympathetic farming family," not separate from it. In fact, only Romek's mother "got hurt"—from bombing, not falling ill. The priest was aware of Romek's situation before he arrived in the village, not just after. The movie never shows Romek fumbling during "elementary prayers and church procedures" while he is in the village. Far from it, Romek even says "Grace before Meals" better than Vladek does. The priest teaches Catechism to Romek, but also to all of the other village children supposedly because the war delayed their First Communion.
2. "Polish Culture: 'Edges of the Lord'," culture.pl, http://www.culture.pl/en/culture/artykuly/dz_boze_skrawki_bogayevicz
3. "Polish Film Festival in Los Angeles - Edges of the Lord," http://www.polishfilmla.org/films/2001/edges_of_the_lord.html
4. Alexander Charns, 2002 January 11, "My Polish grandfather: a dark history, with flashes of light. - 'Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland' - book review," Commonweal, http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1252/is_1_129/ai_82361762
5. William W. Hagen, 1996, "Before the 'Final Solution': Toward a Comparative Analysis of Political Anti-Semitism in Interwar Germany and Poland," Journal of Modern History, 68(2), 351-381; Ellen Land-Weber, 2000, To Save a Life: Stories of Holocaust Rescue, Urbana, University of Illinois Press, http://www.humboldt.edu/~rescuers/
6. This reviewer understands that there is a difference between anti-Judaism, which is supposedly just a "religious" or lifestyle disagreement, and anti-Semitism, which is overtly racist and, in an imperialist context, potentially fascist. However, "Edges of the Lord" makes no such distinction between anti-Judaism and anti-Semitism.
7. "2001 MIM Congress : MIM strongly condemns the CPP position on parasitism," http://www.prisoncensorship.info/archive/etext/wim/cong/cppparasitism.html
8. There are various psychological and sociobiological theories that would claim to explain Romek's parents' altruistic behavior, but these are beside the point. The fact that many parents do feel or subjectively self-report that they care for their children is not being disputed here. And even if the mythical nuclear family, to take an extreme example, were genetically determined to a certain extent, that wouldn't mean that people are powerless to do anything about it.
9. As an ideological orientation or approach, MIM says that "all sex is rape" ("Why do you say 'all sex is rape'?," http://www.prisoncensorship.info/archive/etext/faq/allsexisrape.html). What happens to Maria is a more blatant, egregious manifestation of rape.
10. Daniel Howden, 2004 October 20, "Diaries of another 'Anne Frank' shed light on camp hell," Independent.co.uk, http://news.independent.co.uk/europe/story.jsp?story=573895
11. "Christian-Jewish Relations," http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/anti-semitism/Christian.html ; Jewish Christian Relations, http://www.jcrelations.net/ ; Anti-Defamation League, "Christian-Jewish Relations," http://www.adl.org/PresRele/ChJew_31/
12. "Declaration 'Nostra Aetate'," http://www.vatican.va/archive/hist_councils/ii_vatican_council/documents/vat-ii_decl_19651028_nostra-aetate_en.html ; Thomas G. Lederer, 1998 January, "2000 Years: Relations between Catholics and Jews : Before and after Vatican II," http://www.arthurstreet.com/2000YEARS.htm