Irina Starshenbaum, Harry Melling, and Douglas Booth star in the British director's politically charged romance.
It sometimes seems as though prolific British director Michael Winterbottom has dabbled in almost every major film genre, save for light opera, shark attack stories, and steampunk anime. That said, one of his most recurring genres—aside from comedy-drama films starring Steve Coogan—has been dramatized true stories, especially those about characters trying to navigate or escape conflict zones. This theme dates back to his third feature, Welcome to Sarajevo (1997), through In This World (2002), and the recent Eleven Days in May (co-directed by Mohammed Sawwaf), which documented the 2021 bombing of Palestinians in Gaza and the children who died in the attack.
Director: Michael Winterbottom
Writers: Laurence Coriat, Paul Viragh, Michael Winterbottom
Stars: Irina Starshenbaum, Harry Melling, Douglas Booth
Following that last work—although the project has been in development for 15 years—Winterbottom's latest film, Shoshana, explores the background to the founding of Israel as a state. Like most of the main characters, the protagonist, Shoshana Borochov (Irina Starshenbaum, captivatingly ferocious), was a real historical figure. The daughter of a Russian Socialist Zionist father at a time when these leftist groups wielded substantial influence on proto-Israeli society, Shoshana is a free spirit ahead of her time, sexually active, an excellent shooter, a journalist for the Hebrew newspaper, and the cream of her Tel Aviv social circle, much courted by men fascinated by her beauty and intelligence.
The film tasks him, with the help of reams of subtitled text and old newsreel clips, with exposing the historical political context of the 1930s through voiceover. At the time, Palestine was still under British colonial rule, which was torn between allowing the territory to secede into two states, or a single Jewish state, or simply continuing to rule.
As more Jews settled in the region, many fleeing the rise of Nazism in Europe, tensions between Arabs and Zionist settlers increased. The script by Winterbottom, Laurence Coriat, and Paul Viragh excels in certain ways in illustrating the perspectives of the various factions fighting for control at the time: from the Haganah, the Zionist paramilitary force to which Shoshana belonged, to the Irgun, a radical Zionist organization dedicated to intimidating Arabs into leaving the territory through bombing and assassination. Caught in the middle of this mess are the British police and military, represented here by government representative Robert Chambers (Ian Hart), counter-terrorism officer Geoffry Morton (Harry Melling, in an excellent performance), and Police Constable Tom Wilkin (Douglas Booth), recently arrived from the British Home Counties, who soon falls in love with Shoshana.
Morton and Wilkin team up to find and capture Irgun leader Avraham Stern (Aury Alby), with the goal of dismantling this rapidly growing and increasingly violent terrorist group. But in the then-newly built city of Tel Aviv, where most of the action takes place (the Italian region of Puglia was used as a convincing backdrop, given that the real Tel Aviv is far too urbanized today), everyone knows everyone, and there's little difference between Shoshana and Stern.
Between bursts of passionate frenzy, Shoshana and Tom grapple with their loyalties, making it the ultimate date movie for middle-aged leftists with a taste for political discourse and vintage lingerie.
It also helps that the story feels as relevant today as ever, given the constant problem of division in today's cultures far beyond the Middle East, from Brexit-ravaged Britain to the antagonism between Republican and Democratic states in the United States and beyond. As even a cursory glance at the news from Israel would reveal, the country is nowhere near peace now; it's just the disposition of the factions that has changed.
Like almost all of Winterbottom's work, this film judiciously balances seriousness with more visceral concerns, and generally hits the mark, though Starshenbaum's chemistry with Booth isn't as persuasive as Booth's with Melling. But as a short story about a time and place not often depicted in Western cinema, it will work well.
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