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BAU, ARTIST AT WAR
Director: Sean McNamara Cast: Emile Hirsch, Inbar Lavi, Yan Tual, Adam Tsekhman, Edward Foy, Chris Cope, Josh Blacker, Josh Zuckerman, Eugene Lipinski, Dalias Blake, Pam Kearns MPAA
Rating: Running Time: 2:10 Release Date: 9/26/25 (limited) |
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Review by Mark Dujsik | September 25, 2025 Joseph Bau's art inspired by his imprisonment at a Nazi concentration camp is intermittently shown during Bau, Artist at War, and its flat compositions of bold lines that suggest the mere outlines or shadows of humanity in such an inhuman place are quite striking. On occasion, director Sean McNamara and cinematographer Shawn Seifert attempt to replicate the impression of those artworks, such as an undeniably haunting shot of the silhouettes of a guard tower framed behind and a bird gently perched atop rows of barbed wire. Otherwise, there is nothing visually or, apart from its sometimes-jarring tone, narratively unique about this movie. It is about Bau, a man who survived the concentration camp at Płaszów, a suburb of his home city of Kraków in Poland. The story is set in two periods. One sees a middle-aged Joseph (Emile Hirsch) living in Tel Aviv and contemplating giving court testimony against one of the former guards of the camp. The other, of course, details his experiences at the camp itself. In addition to simply looking as if those scenes at the camp have simply been drained of color instead of being lit and composed for black-and-white, they are also framed as a love story. That the real Bau and his wife met and married at Kraków-Płaszów is a fact. This is not the first cinematic depiction of their wedding, either, and it feels a bit strange how much the filmmakers here want everyone to compare their movie to that prior one or even somehow sees this as a companion piece to it. The lengthy coda, complete with photos of Bau and his family, thinks Bau and his wife Rebecca's participation in that film (the identity of which will be obvious soon enough) is of equal importance to the fact that both of them had some part in saving people within the camp. In other words, the screenplay by Deborah Smerecnik, Ron Bass, and Sonia Kifferstein (based in part on Bau's own memoir) doesn't come across as confident enough to stand on its own. It's counting on our awareness of the more well-known story happening in the background—and, because the movie seems so unsure of its ability to tell its own story, often in the foreground—of Bau's experiences to bolster our connection to this tale. That other story is how Oskar Schindler (Edward Foy) convinced the murderous camp commander Amon Goeth (Josh Blacker) to transfer prisoners from Kraków-Płaszów to his factories, with the aim of saving their lives without any part of the Nazi regime being the wiser. That we know the story of Schindler and his list already is of little concern to McNamara and the screenwriters. Indeed, they're surely hoping that the impact of that history and its depiction in a particular film masterpiece will carry over here, simply by way of the benefit of such a broad connection. What this means instead, however, is that Joseph simply feels like a small part of something beyond him, and as for Rebecca (Inbar Lavi), she exists in this story as a minor part of Joseph's narrative. The framing device scenes, set in Tel Aviv in 1971, are especially frustrating in that way when it comes to Joseph's wife. She isn't even present as a flesh-and-blood figure, only an animated drawing, in that story thread. The movie heavily implies her absence is for a specific reason, so when it reveals that suggestion isn't true in the slightest, we realize the filmmakers have been trying to emotionally manipulate us at the cost of a character who, in theory, should be just as vital to this story as its protagonist. As for Joseph, his personality seems to be the main reason why the people behind the movie believed this story needed to be told. He is somewhat unique within the realm of stories about the Holocaust, to be sure, in that he spends most of his time joking about and mocking the Nazis who have imprisoned him, forced him to work and live under terrible conditions, and are killing so many people at this camp and others. The idea is an intriguing one, to be sure, especially since the entire back-and-forth narrative ultimately leads to what can only be described as a righteous punch line aimed at an unrepentant Nazi. Even so, there's something almost flippant about how Joseph's reliance on humor often makes him come across as if he's practicing material for a stand-up routine, while mostly unnamed and unseen victims are beaten, tormented, and shot all around him. The approach might not have been so glaringly odd, if not for the fact that Joseph and Rebecca's romance is also so shallow. They bump into each other and keep meeting at the camp, as if they're in some twisted romantic comedy, and their dialogue scenes together, as well as Joseph's efforts to sneak into the women's barracks of the camp, give that impression, too. The movie's point, obviously, is that love can exist and help people survive under even the most unthinkable conditions. We know this because Bau, Artist at War flat-out tells us that theme a few times. It makes some sense that a movie with so little trust in its own story wouldn't trust the audience to comprehend its core idea. Copyright © 2025 by Mark Dujsik. All rights reserved. |
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(for strong violent content, thematic material, some language, partial
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