Love Gets a Room (2021): A Holocaust Musical? (Review)

A movie about the Holocaust…but it’s a musical. You’ve got to admit, it takes some cojones to make that movie. Spanish director Rodrigo Cortés obviously believes he has those cojones. The filmmaker resposinble for the challenge of 2010’s claustrophobic, single-setting thriller Buried, steps up now to make Love Gets a Room, available on demand from Friday 30th June and in US cinemas from June 23rd following word of mouth success since its premiere at the Seville festival in 2021.

Inspired by real-life events, Love Gets a Room is the story of a Jewish theatre troupe in Warsaw during the Nazi-occupied Poland of 1942. The film follows young actress Stefcia (Clara Rugaard) and the rest of the company as they both fight to stave off cold, hunger and epidemics and to keep their passion for performing alive for their Jewish neighbours in the Warsaw ghetto – a place and time were, remarkably, theatre flourished. So yes, there is singing and dancing to be had here, but cast aside all thoughts of poor taste and Jerry Lewis burying his own movie, The Day the Clown Cried, because Love Gets a Room is a fitting testament to the joy of creativity and performance in the face of total oppression and pure evil. It is life versus death outlined at its most metaphorically distinctive.

In a manner reminiscent of the similarly theatre-based Birdman from 2014, Cortés’ movie is fond of a one take tracking shot, opening with a remarkable lengthy example that pitches the audience into the maelstrom of the ghetto’s ravaged, wintry streets. Here, we meet Stefcia as she hurriedly makes her way to the theatre for the evening’s performance of Jerzy Jurandot’s real-life 1940 musical comedy ‘Love Looks for an Apartment‘. This is where the film’s real-life inspiration comes to the fore. Jurandot was a poet, dramatist, satirist and songwriter, and a leading light in Warsaw’s cabaret scene before WWII. In 1940, he and his wife, actress Stefania Grodzienska, were interned in the Warsaw Ghetto. Despite their internment, Jurandot continued to workin, organising performances to large audiences in need of distraction from the brutal reality of their hopeless situation. One of his works was Love Looks for an Apartment, a musical comedy in which two couples are forced to share an apartment in the ghetto, leading to something of a ‘love cube’ for its protagonists.

The theatre troupe consists of Stefcia, her boyfriend Edmund (Ferdia Walsh-Peelo) and his little sister Sarah (Dalit Streett Tejeda), Ada (Valentina Bellè), Niusia (Freya Parks), Jozek (Jack Roth, son of Tim Roth) and the troupe’s elders; the diligently firm but fair mother hen, Irena (Anastasia Hille) and the father figure, Zylberman (Henry Goodman). Arriving just moments before the curtain rises for the performance is Stefcia’s ex Patrik (Mark Ryder), who reveals to her in the wings as they wait to go on that he has bribed a Nazi officer in exchange for safe passage out of the ghetto for them both. The news sends Stefcia’s head into a tailspin; Patrik is her ex and she is with Edmund now, so it ought to be out of the question. But to turn down the opportunity of escape would surely mean death? Despite her quandry, the show must go on.

Whereas in Buried, still arguably his best known film, Cortés operated within the extreme restraints of a single setting and single on-screen actor (it’s basically Wrexham FC’s owner Ryan Reynolds in a box for 90 or so minutes) here he flexes his muscles and rises to the challenge of splitting the film into two strands, adopting a ‘play-within-a-film’ structure that allows the action to switch back and forth between the realities of the troupe and their performance of Jurandot’s musical. To that end, the audience are getting two stories for the price of one; the quandry that Stefcia finds herself in backstage and the all-singing and dancing farce presented on the boards out front, each with moments that purposefully resonate with one another. Meanwhile the on-screen audience of downtrodden Jewish souls and the amatuer players performing for them are visibly peturbed to find one of their occupiers, a rifle-wielding Nazi, Magnus Krepper’s Szkop, has found his way into the auditorium to witness the play.

Technically, Love Gets a Room works very well. Those lengthy long take tracking shots mean that Rafa Garcia’s camera is seldom at a standstill, echoing the collective anxiety crackling in the air and a constant sense of urgency. Likewise, Cortés’ editing is similarly on point and the whole atmosphere is heightened by so much of the action taking place in the shadows of the electricity-free backstage areas. It is only when the cast are performing on stage or step outside that we see the protagonists in the light. Unfortunately, the technical accomplishments take precedence over characterisation. I didn’t really come to know the characters assembled here and it was almost as if Cortés expected our sympathetic appreciation of their plight to do the work for him. As a piece of theatre itself or the kind of play British television routinely made in the 1970s and ’80s, Love Gets a Room would work rather better than it does a cinematic experience.

Mark’s Archive: Love Gets a Room (2021)