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Article: `Divided' takes a Czech village's view of World War II.(Knight Ridder Newspapers)
- Article from:
- Knight Ridder/Tribune News Service
- Article date:
- July 19, 2001
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2001 Knight-Ridder/Tribune News Service. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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One of the residents of a German-occupied Czech village in the last years of World War II suggests that the moral dilemmas this situation creates are "what abnormal times do to normal people."
In Jan Hrebejk's "Divided We Fall," the approach to those times is anything but normal. The presence of humor in Holocaust films is, for obvious reasons, a rarity. It was used to quite devastating effect by Agnieszka Holland in "Europa, Europa"and more gratingly in the overrated "Life is Beautiful."
Hrebejk is willing to take the same risk. Like Holland, he understands how a judiciously deployed sense of irony and absurdity can give another dimension_and another ...