Shoshana
⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️
Run Time: 2 hours 1 minute
Stars: Irina Starshenbaum, Douglas Booth, Harry Melling
Writers: Laurence Coriat, Paul Viragh, Michael Winterbottom
Director: Michael Winterbottom
The seemingly endless progression of terrorism, revenge terrorism, and revenge-revenge terrorism that defines geopolitics in Israel and Gaza commands our attention nearly daily. But this gritty and graphic historical drama, set in British-occupied Palestine between the world wars, drives home with awful clarity the dismal truth: Death’s Wheel of Misfortune was spinning there decades — and perhaps centuries — before anyone coined the term “news cycle.”
Directed by the ever-versatile Michael Winterbottom (The Trip, 24 Hour Party People), Shoshana is based on the true story of early Zionist activist Shoshana Borochov who, in the 1930s, we find working at a newspaper in the newly created sea town/Jewish enclave of Tel Aviv. Shoshana (Russian actress Irina Starshenbaum, in her first English-language role) promptly falls in love with a British intelligence officer named Tom (Douglas Booth of Netflix’s The Sandman); an inconvenient match since Tom’s job is to keep radical factions of the newly arriving Jewish population and the long-established Palestinians from killing each other; something they seem constitutionally determined to keep doing.
Indeed, by the time we reach Shoshana’s mid-point — with the hapless Brits vainly, and at times severely, striving to resolve a conflict that dates back thousands of years — we are instinctively bracing ourselves for the next street bomb; the next sniper’s shot; the next brazen killing.
It goes little better for the star-crossed lovers. Shoshana finds herself being drawn ever deeper into the armed resistance; Tom faces intensifying pressure from his boss, Geoffrey (Harry Melling) to turn up the heat on both factions. The radicals — Jewish and Palestinian alike — respond by ambushing and killing British representatives with alarming frequency.
Against the backdrop of seething resentment and explosive violence, life in Tel Aviv goes on with disorienting banality. The seaside cafes are teeming, the nightclubs are jamming, the VIPs still hobnob at lavish receptions where live bands play the latest Gershwin tunes.
Indelibly set in a particular time and place — expertly evoked through lovingly rendered costumes, authentic set design, and a fleet of remarkably preserved vintage vehicles — Shoshana nevertheless speaks most loudly when it sparks contemporary notes for its present-day audience. Those busy cafes defying the threat of a falling bomb could be on a street in Kiev. The faceless 1930s factions engaged in a ghastly escalating violence would immediately recognize the continuing bloody situation that defines today’s Israel and Gaza. The mounting sense of general hopelessness; a sense that society is careening toward a washed-out bridge with no one at the wheel, finds a chilling resonance in any number of 21st century countries.
Director Winterbottom — as comfortable directing a nerve-jangling war drama like Shoshana as he is tossing off the charming Trip films with Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon — uses the romance at the movie’s heart as a way to propel a story that, in its larger context, is going nowhere. In the title role, Starshenbaum brings smug confidence to her portrait of a pioneer who will become the prototype early-Israeli woman: resilient, strong-willed, and dangerous with a machine gun. As Tom, Booth evokes a young Brad Pitt, oozing charm and bureaucratic proficiency, but powerless in the presence of a woman who knows what she wants. In the thankless role of Tom’s by-the-book superior, Melling seems to be having fun jutting out his chin and staring daggers as he issues clipped, sometimes brutal, orders. Slight, slim and angular, scrunching up his face so that it at times seems too small for his head, Melling makes you forget we first saw him as Harry Potter’s rotund, beastly cousin Dudley Dursley.
A historical epic with present-day urgency, Shoshana offers a compelling reminder that, bad as things may be, they are never without precedent. The challenge is: How can we break cycles that seem as old as history itself?
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