Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch Europa Europa
1990 · Agnieszka Holland · Europa Europa on Sightlines
4 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 3 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Watch Hofschneider's face for what it refuses to show. (performance)
He plays Solly with constant interior calculation behind a face that gives nothing away, because showing what he actually feels could get him killed.
Payoff: The performance is built entirely around suppression, since survival here depends on what the face does not do.
Listen for which language Solly speaks in each scene. (sound)
German, Russian, Polish, and Yiddish slide against each other throughout, and how fluently he switches between them is part of what keeps him alive.
Payoff: Language itself becomes a danger he has to manage as carefully as any disguise.
Watch how often the film puts Solly's body in danger. (staging)
Showers, swimming, latrines, and moments of intimacy recur as zones of acute risk, because his circumcision is the one thing no performance can hide.
Payoff: One physical fact keeps threatening to break every identity he has built around it. In the reading: demark. The reading calls this a demark: the one anomaly that everything he says and wears cannot explain away.
Notice when the film breaks into a dream or fantasy. (cutting)
The grounded, documentary-toned camera work is occasionally punctured by stylized passages that let Solly's terror and guilt surface where his face is never allowed to show them.
Payoff: The film finds a place to put the feeling the mask forbids his face from ever showing.
Once you have seen it
Look again at the classroom where Solly is measured with calipers. (staging)
A teacher spans his skull and nose and presents him to the class as a model of Nordic race, using the one Jewish boy in the room to prove a theory about blood.
Payoff: The instruments meant to certify his blood are actually reading a forgery and calling it science. In the reading: le faussaire (the forger). The reading calls Solly a forger: someone who survives by manufacturing identities that are real enough to keep him alive.
Listen for the real Solomon Perel's voice at the very end. (sound)
The film closes by handing the screen and soundtrack to the actual man singing, returning the story from fiction to testimony.
Payoff: The forger who invented himself to survive is finally allowed to tell his own story as himself. In the reading: fabulation / legending. The reading calls this fabulation: a person caught in the act of legending himself into being.
Track how many different identities Solly takes on. (structure)
He moves from Jewish refugee to Soviet orphan to ethnic-German foundling to Wehrmacht interpreter to Hitler Youth pupil, and the film never lets one of these feel more real than another.
Payoff: Each identity is real enough to keep him alive and false enough to end him if it slips.
Carry this in: Watch what his face refuses to show. Every identity he wears is real enough to save him and false enough to kill him.