The Zookeeper’s Wife: A movie not to be missed

Cast: Jessica Chastain, Johan Heldenbergh, Michael McElhatton, Daniel Brühl

Rated: 8/10

Holocaust stories from Hollywood have been quite a draw. Be it the Auschwitz concentration camp horror on tape or beautifully shot saviour stories like The Schindler’s List, what Hitler did to Jews is a story that continues to trend even 73 years later.

The Zookeeper’s Wife does not stretch on the visual acumen of a Steven Spielberg, or even the mega Jew stories that Hollywood has engagingly encased over the decades, but it is a heartwarming tale nevertheless, this time of a Polish couple saving close to 300 Jews during the German occupation of Poland from 1943 to 1945.

Based on the diary of Antonina Zabinski, the wife of zookeeper Jan Zabinski, director Niki Caro has done well to stick in bulk to the story as it evolved from the diary. It is an eventful diary entry which did not need added dramatisation and the director having realised this while mounting her film is a big deal as it lends a natural realism to the convulsive goings-on in Poland during those difficult times.

Lending an ethereal quality to the persona of Antonina, actress Jessica Chastain captures the story with her compassion for animals and human beings alike. She portrays the shades of fear, bravado, commitment, gentleness and even helplessness in equal measure. Daughter of a couple shot by the Bolshviks during the Russian revolution her aversion to war is justified but that she manages to overcome that and helps the Jews by giving them shelter in the destroyed animal cages of her zoo and paving their escape routes through the underground tunnels of her house in the zoo premises has been filmed engagingly by Caro.

Though this film took more than a decade to reach your screen, it is one arresting tale from Poland which you should not miss. Had it not been pegged on the world’s worst human tragedy, it would have been befitting to call this one a languid thriller, what with arresting visuals of big cats roaming around in the streets of Warsaw after the bombing destroys the zoo, moving visuals of Jewish children offering their arms unknowingly to be scooped up in trains going liquidation, animals being shot by the German officer because they are not pure breed, and, of course, the absolutely chilling life portrayed without drama in the Jewish ghetto.

A must see.

Source: Sunday Pioneer, 23 April, 2017