 |  |
Click for Contents
|
P.O. Box 1805,Jerusalem 91017 Tel. 972-2-531-5440, Fax: 972-2-537-9489 Advertising Fax: 972-2-531-5425, Email Editorial: [email protected] Subscriptions: [email protected] Web site: http://www.jrep.com |
When Friends Collide
Shlomo Schwartzberg
Jan Wiener and Arnost Lustig didn�t know, when they agreed to star in a film together, that it would spell the end of their relationship
In the summer of 1988, Two Czech-American Holocaust survivors, 72-year-old Arnost Lustig and 77-year-old Jan Wiener, took a trip back to Europe. Unlike other such journeys by survivors, a camera crew accompanied the two men through the Czech Republic, Slovenia and Italy. The result was �Fighter,� a startling documentary about two dis-tinct personalities, whose long friendship actually ended during filming. It�s a film about memories, perceptions and how differing recollections can affect one�s view of life. Sadly, those remembrances can also split old friends apart, permanently.
Wiener and Lustig, who first met after they had resettled in the U.S., are both professors, but otherwise, they�re a study in contrasts. Lustig is a filmmaker and a widely published author, as well as a teacher of literature and screenwriting who spends part of the year at Washington�s American University and the remainder in Prague. He is also a survivor of Theresienstadt, the infamous ghetto-concentration camp used by the Nazis as a propaganda vehicle; his escape from there was dramatized in the 1964 film �Diamonds of the Night,� a classic of the Czech New Wave of cinema, and which Lustig co-wrote. Yet, despite his horrendous experiences, he is a bon vivant, an optimist and a romantic.
Wiener is more pragmatic, a fit senior citizen who boxes regularly and sees things �as they are,� and who has spent his whole life fighting against those who have threatened or even slighted him. It�s his journey that the film is about and, mostly, it is his reminiscences that we get to hear. Wiener witnessed his father�s and stepmother�s suicides, lost his mother, who died in Theresienstadt, and then, in an incredibly dramatic escape, fled to Italy by hiding under the toilet chute of a speeding locomotive. In England he signed on with the Royal Air Force (RAF) as a fighter pilot and, with other members of the Czech resistance, flew sorties against the Germans. As if that wasn�t enough, after the war, he was accused by his country�s new Communist government of being a British spy and was sent to a labor camp for five years.
That checkered history formed a tough man and in one of the most compelling, chilling anecdotes of the film, Wiener talks about what happened when he returned to Czechoslovakia after the war (he left again in 1964) with the intention of killing the Czech collaborator who had told him that his shoes would outlive him. But the fighter that Wiener is, and that the title refers to, continues his pugilistic stance in the present, as when he confronts the people who saved him (and incredibly � and sadly � don�t remember doing so) or when he spars with Lustig. Wiener is still angry, never more so than when he sits and argues with his friend.
Their biggest argument is about the motives of the Italian carabiniere who helped Wiener flee from the Nazis. Lustig insists that he must have done so because the young Jewish man reminded him of his own son. Wiener will have none of that, and, in fact, refuses even to speculate about the motives behind the Italian�s good deed. That disagreement over a seemingly trivial matter, which Wiener stubbornly resuscitates after the two men appear to have settled their differences, is what causes the irreparable rift between the pair.
Though �Fighter� is centered around elderly men, its three creators are young: 28-year-old writer-director Amir Bar-Lev and co-producers Alex Mamlet, 29, and Jonathan Crosby, 32. (Those are their official credits but Bar-Lev considers that all three actually co-directed the film.) The three are troubled that the protagonists have fallen out, especially since it was they who insisted that Lustig accompany Wiener to Europe. �In some ways we had to make a decision whether or not to salvage their friendship or whether to continue with the filming,� says Crosby, as the three men discuss the film after its well-received showing at the Toronto International Film Festival. (�Fighter� will also be screened at the Haifa International Film Festival over the Sukkot holiday.)
But, adds Mamlet, �It wasn�t up to us to salvage the friendship. There wasn�t much to do except stop filming,� which they did not do. �We had no idea it was going to be as explosive as it ended up being,� says Crosby.
The trio concede that they manipulated Wiener and Lustig, and hence the film�s outcome; not allowing them to bring their wives along exacerbated matters. �Jan really wanted to bring his wife on the trip, we know she�s a soothing factor. [But] we wouldn�t have gotten the fireworks [if the women had come],� Mamlet candidly admits.
Says Bar-Lev: �What bothered me even more than their friendship falling apart was [that] we just put Jan under so much stress.� Wiener, in fact, has had two strokes � the first in July, the day after the film had its final showing at the Karlovy Vary festival, where it received a special jury citation � and just recently underwent a successful operation to clear his arteries.
�I even feel guilty about that,� says Bar-Lev, though he insists that Wiener is happy with the final product. Tellingly, the director and his subject are estranged. �He and I are not on good terms as we once were. Only recently has he understood why we brought Arnost along.� Bar-Lev attributes �Fighter�s� contentious structure to the �ingrained hubris of filmmaking. You put the film first. Anybody who tells you otherwise is either not a filmmaker or is just lying.�
Bar-Lev and Mamlet originally met Jan Wiener in 1993 during a semester they spent studying at the famed Prague Film Academy, where Wiener was attached to the humanities department as part of an exchange program. (Today, Wiener spends part of the year teaching literature and history in Prague, and the rest of his time teaching hiking and canoeing in Massachusetts, where his home is.) They immediately knew that his dramatic story cried out for film treatment. But when they looked at their initial film footage, they realized something was missing. �It was not engaging,� admits Crosby.
Ironically, the idea of adding Lustig to the movie came about because of Wiener�s constant � and often disparaging � references to his friend Arnost, says Bar-Lev. �It started with cheap red wine. He kept bad-mouthing Arnost because Arnost had just visited him [in his hometown of Lenox, Massachusetts] and brought him cheap red wine.�
Then there was the incident surrounding Wiener�s RAF pin. Lustig, who was not a flyer, wanted to wear Wiener�s pin. �Wiener was so pissed off that he would even have the gall to wear it,� says Mamlet, chuckling. �He was afraid of Lustig tarnishing his reputation, his name. Arnost kept badgering Wiener and finally, in kind of a loving way, Jan said take it and shove it up your ass.�
Needless to say, the filmmakers felt there was some kind of chemistry between the two men that needed to be captured on film. (Actually, Lustig had always wanted to take a trip back to Europe with Wiener but the latter, perhaps prophetically, had resisted the suggestion.) As with others who have seen �Fighter,� the Toronto audiences were especially taken with the movie�s Odd Couple, and their comedic bantering and disputations, which is perhaps the film�s most unusual quality. But, says Bar-Lev, they don�t all see the pair the same way.
�A lot of people side with either Arnost or Jan, which is endlessly interesting to me,� he says. �Somebody says, what�s his name, the good one. You mean Arnost, I say, and they say, no, Jan. I hate that guy Arnost. I talked to some Czech director who said, I loved the film but you did a great disservice to my friend Arnost. You made him look like a fool.�
THE FILMMAKERS DENY THAT they themselves took sides in the movie. �I think that the film brings out so many emotions for people that they can�t help but try to find a side to take,� says Crosby. But Bar-Lev has his own theories about whose worldview makes the most sense in �Fighter.� �It�s obvious to me that things never happen for the reason you think they do. Survival, especially, is full of serendipitous, capricious events. Jan really believes he was the agent of his own fate but nobody is really the agent of their own fate.�
Still, Bar-Lev, who was born in Los Angeles but whose father is Israeli, felt a special affinity for Jan and his experiences. �[Alex and I] were initially interested in Jan�s story just because he never considered himself a victim per se.� Growing up in America did not foster that self-sufficient image of Jews or survivors, says Bar-Lev carefully, adding that his background made him look at things differently from other American Jews.
Those Jews, feels Bar-Lev, identify themselves too often solely through the prism of the Holocaust. �Often when you talk to people our age, young Jews, [and ask them] what it means to be Jewish, Hitler comes up in the first couple of sentences; that bothers me, because I don�t want Hitler in my psyche. I don�t think he belongs there. I don�t think the perpetuity of Judaism in the face of adversity is the paramount goal of [being Jewish].�
Lustig, too, was attractive as a film subject, says Mamlet, because he deviated, albeit in a different way, from the common perception many hold of survivors. �You think of Holocaust survivors as being sad and contemplative and Lustig was just so full of joy, and every single moment of being around him and watching him looking out of a window and smiling and laughing at life was really a great lesson.�
�Fighter� was a lesson of sorts, he says. �In a lot of ways Wiener�s story helped shape my definition of what it was like to grow up Jewish in America. He personified a lot of things that I never really saw [before] as an example of a kind of Jewish strength and resiliency.� Bringing Lustig into the picture only helped solidify that perception and made the film what it is.
�It worked out to be a much better film than we set out to make.�
l
Arts
|
 |
|
© The Jerusalem Report 1999-2003 |  |