THE STORY – In 1938 Tel Aviv, tensions are high as the British, under their League of Nations mandate, attempt to maintain order in a city with a mixed Arabian and Jewish population. Thomas Wilkin, a British deputy superintendent of the Palestinian police, becomes romantically involved with Shoshana, the daughter of Ber Borochov, a co-founder of the Zionist labor movement.
THE CAST – Irina Starshenbaum, Douglas Booth, Harry Melling & Aury Alby
THE TEAM – Michael Winterbottom (Director/Writer), Laurence Coriat & Paul Viragh (Writers)
THE RUNNING TIME – 120 Minutes
When thinking about the unholy mess that is the current state of Middle Eastern politics, it’s important to remember the real reason why it’s so bad: The British. Following the defeat of the Ottoman Empire in World War I, the League of Nations put the region known as Palestine under British administration. Under the terms of the mandate, Britain was to “provide administrative advice and assistance,” as well as establish a “national home for the Jewish people,” alongside the Palestinian Arab communities that had been in existence for centuries. It was, to be fair, an impossible situation, but they still managed to bumble their way through a decade before an Arab revolt ended up taking the lives of over 5,000 Arabs, 400 Jews, and 200 British at the end of the 1930s. In the wake of the revolt, multiple extremist Zionist groups started fighting back, leaving British law enforcement in quite a pickle.
This is the state of the world in Michael Winterbottom’s “Shoshana,” a historical thriller based on the life of Shoshana Borochov, the daughter of one of the founders of socialist Zionism, embodied by the kibbutz system of communal living. In 1938, Shoshana (Irina Starshenbaum) is working hard establishing kibbutzim and writing about women’s issues for a newspaper in newly built Tel Aviv. She’s known by all and is lusted after by most men. Still, she only has eyes for Tom Wilkin (Douglas Booth), a British deputy superintendent of the Palestinian police in Tel Aviv. Wilkin is well-liked for a Brit, which is to say, everyone tolerates him. He knows Hebrew, which makes him a problem for the extremist groups Irgun and Haganah, and he’s not a fan of theirs either. However, Wilkin is a good intelligence agent, and he strategically allows the less extremist Haganah to have weapons in case something breaks out with the much more violent Irgun, led by Avraham Stern (Aury Alby).
The film’s opening narration breezes through so much complicated real-world context for the story so quickly that it can be difficult to find your footing in the film’s first few minutes. But once the film settles into its story, everything becomes much clearer. Winterbottom cultivates a strong sense of place, using production and costume design to reveal character. The plot is straightforward enough to follow, allowing the complex politics of the setting to take center stage. The film’s screenplay, which Winterbottom co-wrote with Laurence Coriat and Paul Viragh, shines most when the characters debate what they want Israel to be and how they plan to achieve it. It exposes the revolutionaries of the Irgun for the extremist terrorists they were, but never apologizes for their behavior. Then, as now, most everyone agreed that Israel had the right to exist, but there’s a difference between arming yourself because you know your settlements are surrounded by people who don’t want you there (as Shoshana does on her kibbutzim) and blowing up a busy street market as a way of score-settling (as members of the Irgun do).
Shoshana deeply believes in her father’s ideals, but not to the point where she would condemn the Irgun – she sees them for what they are, but recognizes that they’re working towards the same goal. While Tom may personally believe in the “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” maxim, he can’t let himself believe in anything other than what his superiors tell him, which makes them fundamentally misaligned. They don’t realize this, or at least don’t fully acknowledge it, until the head of the Tel Aviv office is killed in an explosion. The higher-ups replace him with Assistant Superintendent Geoffrey Morton (Harry Melling), who has had success in quelling the Arab rebellion in the West Bank city of Jenin by employing ruthless tactics to sniff out hidden members of the rebellion. He’s unprepared for the vipers’ nest that is Tel Aviv, a city with multiple opposing factions of Arabs and Jews living side-by-side and occasionally killing each other, and despite his experience telling him otherwise, Tom is obliged to go along with Morton’s plans, which include torturing members of the Irgun to get information, putting him even more at odds with Shoshana.
Every aspect of this story is compelling, and Winterbottom’s direction is effectively taut during the sequences where we’re waiting for a bomb to go off or chasing multiple parties through crowded streets. Unfortunately, though, the central star-crossed romance can’t compete with all the political intrigue. Compared to the passionate politics surrounding them, Tom and Shoshana barely register. Part of this can be attributed to the actors, both of whom possess plenty of charisma but end up looking vacant or mildly constipated, rather than torn between love and duty. A late-film emotional breakdown for Shoshana feels particularly out of place, an explosion of emotions that goes too far over the top for a film that mostly stays very reserved. When thinking of “Shoshana,” one is reminded of a line from “Casablanca,” another film about star-crossed lovers in a deadly city – it doesn’t take much to see that the problems of two little people really don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world. Tel Aviv in the late 1930s would be a compelling setting for any number of stories that could enlighten present-day audiences about this pivotal moment in history. Still, the romance between Tom and Shoshana needed to be told with a lot more verve to anchor this story successfully. Instead, it’s so bland that it drags the rest of the film down with it.
