Angry Harvest

Angry Harvest

Somewhere a little over the rainbow from World War II, “Angry Harvest” seems to exist in a charmed land. It’s a land where Jews are persecuted and Nazi soldiers march through town. But it’s also a land where a farmer can cook an entire goose for his dinner and there is milk and bread and honey, and citizens chat with alarming nonchalance about the war, the Underground and the business of selling protection to Jews.

This film world simply doesn’t suggest the desperation of its time.

The movie takes place in Poland, where a prosperous farmer (Armin Mueller Stahl) tends his fields pretty much undisturbed by Germans. He is in many ways a good man but simple, never having married because women make him nervous. One day while he is out in his field, a woman in a fur coat (Elisabeth Trissenaar) sneaks up and tries to steal a loaf of bread. He wrestles her down to the ground, sees that she is sick and feverish, decides to take her in and nurse her back to health. She is Jew who jumped from train headed for death camps.

He hides her in his basement until now, everything generally believable but then it starts edging toward soap opera.

And though I have sympathy with what it’s trying to do show how even amid war and genocide an ordinary human relationship can develop the movie never really seems convinced there is a war on.

The lonely farmer falls for the woman with unpredictable results; some days he slavishly offers to do anything for her; other days he forces her to have sex. His motives are at least comprehensible; but she remains an enigma, first fighting him off then sometimes actually seeming to like him.

There are times when they act like courting couple. But their lovers’ quarrels are odd since they often revolve around woman getting mad at being cooped up inside. She says confinement is driving her crazy, threatens to leave. Where does she think she can go? “Angry Harvest” paints picture of local citizenry a little different from the one we got in “Shoah.”

Many people seem inclined to shelter Jews: some because they think it’s right, others because they can make money that way. The local Underground is so relaxed that one key conversation takes place in a neighborhood pub. The relationship between the farmer and the woman is based on emotion but occasionally escalates into religious arguments.

There are many irritating problems with logic. For instance, would a cosmopolitan woman really be in this kind of relationship with a hermit farmer? Does he then become so infatuated that he drives his wagon sideways and kicks up his heels? Or what about the sequence where he packs the priest’s sister off on an Underground mission and she gets killed never knowing why, I might add. And so help me, in the scene where he confesses this to the priest, they don’t show the priest’s reaction.

“Angry Harvest,” one of this year’s Oscar nominees for best foreign film, once again demonstrates the flaws inherent in that selection process. It was selected by West Germany, survived the screening process and was nominated. Meanwhile “Ran” sits on the shelf. Until they start picking best foreign film nominees on artistic instead of geographical-political grounds, it won’t mean much.

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