{"id":8929,"date":"2014-11-07T00:06:13","date_gmt":"2014-11-07T08:06:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/?p=8929"},"modified":"2014-11-05T16:16:24","modified_gmt":"2014-11-06T00:16:24","slug":"creepy-well-crafted-thriller","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/2014\/11\/07\/creepy-well-crafted-thriller\/","title":{"rendered":"Creepy, well-crafted thriller"},"content":{"rendered":"

In her film The German Doctor<\/em>, Lucia Puenzo tries to capture Josef Mengele\u2019s \u201cvery sociopathic, complex personality.\u201d\u00a0<\/strong>(photo from Vancouver Jewish Film Festival)<\/em><\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

As a high school student in the 1990s, Lucia Puenzo was fascinated and mystified by an open secret: hundreds of Nazi war criminals found refuge in her native Argentina.<\/p>\n

\u201cI was intrigued that so many families knew what was going on because they had a German man on their block or somewhere in their neighborhood,\u201d recalled the acclaimed novelist and filmmaker. \u201cMaybe they didn\u2019t know so much in the \u201960s and \u201970s but, by the \u201980s or \u201990s, everybody knew. How could they not open their mouths and say what happened? It had a lot of echoes of our military coup d\u2019etat, where so many Argentine families didn\u2019t speak out.\u201d<\/p>\n

In her 2011 novel Wakolda<\/em>, Puenzo explored the devious machinations of a German doctor in the Patagonian town of Bariloche circa 1960 who befriends a young girl. The erstwhile physician injects her with growth hormones before turning his attention to her pregnant mother, distracting the suspicious father with a plan to mass-market his handmade dolls.<\/p>\n

Puenzo adapted the novel for the screen, shifting the point of view from the doctor to the child. The German Doctor<\/em>, which swept Argentina\u2019s major film awards and was the country\u2019s official submission for last year\u2019s Oscar for best foreign language film, is a creepy, precisely crafted thriller made more unsettling by its restraint. It screens Nov. 12 in the Vancouver Jewish Film Festival.<\/p>\n

At 37, Puenzo has already published five widely translated novels and directed three singular films, including XXY<\/em>, her prize-winning tale of an intersex teenager. Smart and fearless, she is attracted to subjects that others find off-limits or taboo \u2013 like the Nazi presence in Argentina.<\/p>\n

\u201cFor me, the big mystery has always been why this subject, that could be a hundred films and a hundred novels, has never been taken to film before,\u201d she explained in a long-distance phone interview. \u201cWe have maybe a few excellent documentaries on the subject but not one fiction film, and maybe we have five or six novels, and that\u2019s all speaking about the subject.\u201d<\/p>\n

The German Doctor<\/em> did solid box office in Argentina, which Puenzo sees as confirmation of pent-up interest. The film has been released in dozens of countries, including several European nations.<\/p>\n

The film succinctly illustrates how a cautious physician who adults would view with suspicion, let\u2019s call him Josef Mengele, could win a child\u2019s trust.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn the camps, there were so many horrible testimonies of how kids would call him Uncle Mengele. He would have sweets to give to the children and then he would take them to his experiments,\u201d Puenzo said.<\/p>\n

The German Doctor<\/em> captures that deviousness and single-mindedness, while persuasively depicting the polite veneer Mengele devised to mask his lunacy and deceive people.<\/p>\n

\u201cAfter the war, after the concentration camps, he disguised himself as this very civilized, seductive, enchanting man that lived for decades in three countries of Latin America without anybody suspecting who he was,\u201d Puenzo said. \u201cI think that\u2019s how you have to portray this very sociopathic, complex personality who disguised himself. He was not the stereotype of the bad guy whom you could see coming.\u201d<\/p>\n

Puenzo comes across as earnest and serious but, befitting someone with a master\u2019s degree in literature and critical theory, she recognizes the relationship between pop culture and popular perceptions of history.<\/p>\n

\u201cI remember films like The Boys of Brazil,\u201d she said. \u201cI loved it in a way, it\u2019s such a strange film, but at the same time it\u2019s a stereotype of Mengele. I think to honor these most horrific monsters, you really have to show them in all their complexity. They were much more dangerous than we think.\u201d<\/p>\n

The German Doctor<\/em> is in Spanish and German with English subtitles; it is rated PG-13 for thematic material and brief nudity. For the full schedule of this year\u2019s VJFF, which started Nov. 6, visit vjff.org<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Michael Fox<\/strong> is a writer and film critic living in San Francisco.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In her film The German Doctor, Lucia Puenzo tries to capture Josef Mengele\u2019s \u201cvery sociopathic, complex personality.\u201d\u00a0(photo from Vancouver Jewish Film Festival) As a high school student in the 1990s, Lucia Puenzo was fascinated and mystified by an open secret: hundreds of Nazi war criminals found refuge in her native Argentina. \u201cI was intrigued that […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":8897,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[787],"tags":[53,2399,2401,2280,2281,2400],"class_list":["post-8929","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-tv-film","tag-holocaust","tag-lucia-puenzo","tag-mengele","tag-vancouver-jewish-film-festival","tag-vjff","tag-wakolda"],"blocksy_meta":{"styles_descriptor":{"styles":{"desktop":"","tablet":"","mobile":""},"google_fonts":[],"version":8}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8929","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8929"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8929\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/8897"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8929"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8929"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8929"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}