A La Vie (To Life)

Twenty years after Auschwitz, Helen reconnects with two friends who survived the camp along with her. The ladies meet at a French seaside resort, where they laugh, sing and eat their way through a breezy weekend on the beach. The happy tone ignores any psychological damage the women sustained, but French screenwriter-director Jean-Jacques Zilber-mann, inspired by his mother’s story of suffering and survival, suggests that life trumps death—even at Auschwitz. Breaking Glass Pictures (bgpics.com). 

Princess

Adar, 12, lives with her mother and her mother’s boyfriend. Adar’s mother is the worst kind of parent, alternately seductive, punishing and len­ient. Adar adopts the quality of seductiveness—a dangerous choice in a family that uses physical contact to replace healthy emotions. With this setup ripe for tragedy, Adar (Shira Hass) begins to roam the streets, where she meets the beautiful, androgynous Alan, her soulmate. She brings him home, and he seduces the mother’s boyfriend. Adar then becomes the victim of her boyfriend’s raging and ambiguous needs.

If Princess, written and di­­rected by Tali Shalom-Ezer, is to be taken seriously as an ex­­ploration of child abuse, it should be pillor­­ied for blaming the victim. If it’s to be taken seriously as art, it should be critiqued for the tedium of closeups of Adar looking seductive, bored or troubled. In the film’s one au­­thentic mo­ment, Alan spits out, “This is the most disgusting family I’ve ever seen.” Agreed. Breaking Glass Pic­tures.