Divided We Fall (film)
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''Divided We Fall'' ( literally translated as ''We Must Help Each Other)'' is a
2000 2000 was designated as the International Year for the Culture of Peace and the World Mathematics, Mathematical Year. Popular culture holds the year 2000 as the first year of the 21st century and the 3rd millennium, because of a tende ...
Czech Czech may refer to: * Anything from or related to the Czech Republic, a country in Europe ** Czech language ** Czechs, the people of the area ** Czech culture ** Czech cuisine * One of three mythical brothers, Lech, Czech, and Rus *Czech (surnam ...
film directed by
Jan Hřebejk Jan Hřebejk (; born 27 June 1967) is a Czech film director and actor. Life and career Born in Prague, Hřebejk graduated from high school in 1987 and continued his studies at the Film and TV School of the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague ...
. It was nominated for the
Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film The Academy Award for Best International Feature Film (known as Best Foreign Language Film prior to 2020) is one of the Academy Awards handed out annually by the U.S.-based Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS). It is given to a ...
. Anna Šišková won a Lion award for best actress.


Plot

The film opens in 1939
Czechoslovakia Czechoslovakia ( ; Czech language, Czech and , ''Česko-Slovensko'') was a landlocked country in Central Europe, created in 1918, when it declared its independence from Austria-Hungary. In 1938, after the Munich Agreement, the Sudetenland beca ...
. Horst, a
Czech Czech may refer to: * Anything from or related to the Czech Republic, a country in Europe ** Czech language ** Czechs, the people of the area ** Czech culture ** Czech cuisine * One of three mythical brothers, Lech, Czech, and Rus *Czech (surnam ...
- German
Nazi Nazism (), formally named National Socialism (NS; , ), is the far-right politics, far-right Totalitarianism, totalitarian socio-political ideology and practices associated with Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party (NSDAP) in Germany. During H ...
collaborator married to a German woman and co-worker of Josef, brings food to Josef and his wife Marie, who are
Czechs The Czechs (, ; singular Czech, masculine: ''Čech'' , singular feminine: ''Češka'' ), or the Czech people (), are a West Slavs, West Slavic ethnic group and a nation native to the Czech Republic in Central Europe, who share a common Bohemia ...
. Josef hates the Nazis. When Josef finds David, who had escaped a concentration camp in occupied Poland after first being sent to the Theresienstadt
concentration camp A concentration camp is a prison or other facility used for the internment of political prisoners or politically targeted demographics, such as members of national or ethnic minority groups, on the grounds of national security, or for exploitati ...
in northern Bohemia, Josef and Marie decide to hide him in their apartment. Horst makes an unannounced visit, bringing presents as usual. Marie is ambivalent about their secret: On one hand she never misses an opportunity to blame her husband for bringing in the Jew, but on the other she is merciful and sympathetic towards the poor kid locked in the closet day and night. She suggests that Josef accept Horst's job offer evicting Czech Jews from their homes, so as to get more protection and deflect possible suspicions. Josef accepts and is considered a collaborator by the neighbor Franta (who had tried to give David over to the Nazi authorities, when he first escaped from a concentration camp). Marie spends the days learning French from David and getting more and more tender toward him. Horst's visits become more frequent, and one afternoon, he attempts to rape Marie. Josef gets his fertility tested to confirm a long-time rumor: He can't have children. Humiliated by his earlier antics, Horst takes revenge on Marie by forcing them to provide lodging for his supervisor, a committed Nazi bureaucrat, who had suffered a stroke after Nazis killed his son for deserting the army. Marie refuses to accept him on the grounds that she is pregnant. Unfortunately, the community is well-aware that Josef and Marie are infertile, and Josef proposes that David get Marie pregnant in order to stage a "miracle" and avoid further investigation. After much resistance from Marie, she and David have sex. Marie becomes pregnant, and Horst eventually apologizes for his previous behavior. As the Germans lose ground in
World War II World War II or the Second World War (1 September 1939 – 2 September 1945) was a World war, global conflict between two coalitions: the Allies of World War II, Allies and the Axis powers. World War II by country, Nearly all of the wo ...
, Horst's behavior begins to change. Based on his previous suspicions that someone else is living with Josef and Marie, he redirects German authorities when the latter search the street house by house. Finally, the Germans are defeated and the Czech people take brutal revenge on them. As the Germans are being driven out, Marie goes into labor. Josef frantically searches for a doctor, but the streets of the city are in chaos and the Nazi-affiliated doctor has already been captured. Josef finally finds the new ruling troika which includes his old neighbor Franta as the representative of the Czech Resistance. Unfortunately, Franta remembers him as a collaborator and orders his arrest. Josef protests his innocence and invites them to meet David as proof of his ambivalence towards the Jews, in exchange for a chance to find the Nazi doctor to deliver Marie's baby. In the jails, Josef finds that the doctor has committed suicide but also finds Horst crouched in a corner. Remembering Horst's previous actions that saved David's life, Josef tells the Czech partisan guards that Horst is his doctor. The partisans escort them to Josef's house, driving through the ruins of the city. Horst is able to quickly assume the role of Marie's doctor due to his experience delivering his own sons, much to Marie's initial horror. The partisans still want to see David in order to prove Josef's allegiance, but in the chaos and gunfire, David had hid himself elsewhere. The captain of the partisan unit, a member of the regular Czechoslovak Army, does not believe Josef's story and is about to shoot him, but David shows up at the last minute after Josef's despairing plea: "Let us be human!" After they all return to the household, Marie and David's son is born. The partisans interrogate David about Horst's background, but David, realizing that Horst had known about the situation for over two years and had not reported it, supports Josef's claim that Horst is a doctor and thus saves Horst's life as well. Days later, Josef walks the baby through the devastated streets of his city. In the ruins, he imagines David's deceased family and his supervisor's youngest son sitting around a small table, waving at him. Josef picks up David's son and waves his hand back. An aria from J.S. Bach's ''
St Matthew Passion The ''St Matthew Passion'' (), BWV 244, is a '' Passion'', a sacred oratorio written by Johann Sebastian Bach in 1727 for solo voices, double choir and double orchestra, with libretto by Picander. It sets the 26th and 27th chapters of th ...
'' (''Erbarme dich, mein Gott'', God, please have mercy on our frailty!) is the denouement of the film.


Cast

*
Bolek Polívka Boleslav Polívka (born 31 July 1949, in Vizovice) is a Czech film and theatre actor, mime, playwright, and screenwriter. He has appeared in more than 40 films. Career Polívka first started appearing in films in the 1960s. He graduated from ...
- Josef Čížek * Anna Šišková - Marie Čížková * Csongor Kassai - David Wiener * Jaroslav Dušek - Horst Prohaska * Martin Huba - Dr. Albrecht Kepke * Jiří Pecha - František Šimáček * Simona Stašová - Libuše Šimáčková * Vladimír Marek - SS Officer * Richard Tesařík - Captain * Karel Heřmánek - Captain


Reception


Critical response

''Divided We Fall'' has an approval rating of 90% on
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website
Rotten Tomatoes Rotten Tomatoes is an American review aggregator, review-aggregation website for film and television. The company was launched in August 1998 by three undergraduate students at the University of California, Berkeley: Senh Duong, Patrick Y. Lee ...
, based on 62 reviews, and an average rating of 7.29/10. The website's critical consensus states, "Divided We Fall takes a complex look at World War II, skillfully balancing humor and gravity".
Metacritic Metacritic is an American website that aggregates reviews of films, television shows, music albums, video games, and formerly books. For each product, the scores from each review are averaged (a weighted average). Metacritic was created ...
assigned the film a weighted average score of 69 out of 100, based on 23 critics, indicating "generally favorable reviews".


Themes

Throughout the film, none of the principal characters is shown to be purely good or purely bad. Josef has had to collaborate with the Nazis to provide additional cover while hiding a Jew in his home; Horst has been a pro-German collaborator, but has also kept his old friend's secret, Marie has had to compromise herself for the sake of their safety, and even the anti-Nazi partisan Franta, now in a position of authority, had at one time tried to turn David over to the Germans. But by film's end the war is over and it is time to work toward reconciliation and rebuilding. Thus, while ostensibly about the Nazi occupation and its aftermath, "Divided We Fall" carried a similar message of reconciliation for the contemporary Czech Republic in the aftermath of Soviet occupation and domination. The imagery of the film is not even thinly disguised: Josef and Marie have a child that is savior (both for them and Horst), but Josef is not the father. It is a child of David. The birth is even attended by three "wise men": a Czech, a German, and a Russian.


See also

* List of submissions to the 73rd Academy Awards for Best Foreign Language Film * List of Czech submissions for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film


References


Notes


Citations


External links

* * {{DEFAULTSORT:Divided We Fall (Film) 2000 films 2000s war comedy films Czech war comedy films 2000s Czech-language films Holocaust films Czech resistance to Nazi occupation in film Czech Lion Awards winners (films) Films set in the Czech Republic Films directed by Jan Hřebejk Golden Kingfisher winners Czech World War II films Sony Pictures Classics films