alestine. Late 1930s. Efforts by a growing Jewish population in the region to form the state of Israel have seen terror attacks and bombings from both sides as local Arabs resist the recent influx of Jewish-Europeans fleeing an increasingly hostile central Europe, while the British desperately try to keep the peace.
Mere hours before the Saturday evening premiere of Michael Winterbottom’s latest film Shoshana, which is showing at the BFI London Film Festival, the film’s events became searingly relevant once again, as Hamas launched a massive surprise attack, killing hundreds of Israelis, and the state retaliated with large-scale strikes on cities in the Gaza Strip.
Violence is never far away in the historic region of Palestine, in life or in Winterbottom’s film, which pulls no punches in displaying the horrors of terrorism, with bomb blasts, indiscriminate shootings and cold-blooded murder. The audience is quickly brought up to speed with archive newsreel footage and a voiceover; our narrator is Shoshana, played by Irina Starshenbaum. The daughter of Russian Marxist Zionist Ber Borochov, she is a member of the barely-legal Haganah territorial army, an organisation founded to defend the Yishuv, the group of Jewish residents in the region living there before the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948.
At a party in Tel Aviv, she meets and falls for Douglas Booth’s pragmatic British policeman Thomas Wilkin, who is struggling to maintain any kind of peace between the various factions – and learn Hebrew.
Given the hostile relationship some militant Jews hold toward the British, this relationship alone is enough to make Shoshana’s life precarious, but things get worse when Harry Melling’s Superintendent Geoffrey Morton arrives. Morton has enjoyed success in Jenin suppressing Arab violence through fairly brutal methods; now he is transplanted into Tel Aviv to do the same with the Jewish independence movement.
Shoshana is part love story, part political thriller
/ LFFMorton has no love of nuance or politics, he refuses to adjust his modus operandi to an increasingly volatile situation and inevitably attitudes toward the British sour further, with Shoshana, Wilkin and Morton all finding themselves in the crosshairs of the different factions. An assassination attempt is never far away.
Shoshana is a bold effort to tackle a fraught subject, so it’s a shame that Winterbottom, a director whose past credits include The Trip and 24 Hour Party People, doesn’t seem to quite know what he wants to do with it. Despite Shoshana giving the film its title, her character is sidelined for much of the narrative, in favour of the two men and their hunt for Avraham Stern (Aury Alby), the leader of the paramilitary organisation Irgun, leaving Starshenbaum with very little to work with (she acquits herself admirably with what she does have, although one graphic sex scene is entirely unnecessary).
Mellor, by now famous from both Harry Potter and The Queen’s Gambit but still oddly boyish, is a little raw as the supposed hard-nosed, cut-throat superintendent Morton: “That’s one less of them,” he quips when a bombmaker accidentally kills himself. The film feels like it should be Booth’s; Wilkin is torn between his love for Shoshana and navigating the grey areas of his job, all while trying to stifle his superior’s worst excesses and keep the fragile peace in Tel Aviv as best as he can.
But Winterbottom seems scared to fully commit to any one of the characters, instead trying to fashion a sort of narrative triple-hander between the three actors, part love story, part manhunt. The film spends so much time awkwardly balancing these elements that it forgets the need for forward momentum.
The subject matter, style and violence has echoes of Steven Spielberg’s Jewish-revenge drama Munich – but that film’s sprawl was all centred around Eric Bana’s Avner, and it felt like an urgent, timely reaction to the War on Terror. Shoshana, by contrast, feels like a missed opportunity. Worse, despite taking the history of its subject so seriously, it’s in danger of erring on the side of trivial, in light of current events. It’s a brave effort, but since it’s not clear what Winterbottom, wants to say, he ultimately ends up saying nothing very much at all.
119 mins, cert TBC
Shoshana screens as part of the BFI London Film Festival at the ICA on Tuesday October 10, at 3.15pm; bfi.org.uk/lff