By Emilio Frenk.
Director: Niki Caro
Cast: Jessica Chastain, Johan Heldenbergh, Timothy Radford, Efrat Dor, Iddo Goldberg, Michael McElhatton, Val Maloku and Daniel Brühl.
Rating: Very Good.
Director Niki Caro, who made the dramas “Whale Rider” and “North Country”, brings “The Zookeper`s Wife”, another movie from the genre and I must say that despite of the cliché moments the movie had the results were interesting.
Based on true events, the movie takes place in Warsaw, Poland and tells the story of Antonina Zabinski (Jessica Chastain) a woman who works with her husband Jan (Johan Heldenbergh) as keeper´s of the zoo.
They both are animals lovers and literally take the zoo as their home. Everything will change when the Nazi´s bomb the zoo killing most of the animals and the Zabinski´s are left only with their priceless animals until Nazi Zoologist Lutz Heck (Daniel Brühl) makes a deal with Antonina to deliver the animals to Berlin and Heck will deliver them back to Warsaw once the war is over.
At the end the Zabinski`s agree to Heck`s offer. Now the zoo is with no animals and the Zabinski`s will take the advantage of using the zoo to hide Jews without the Nazi`s even noticing it.
Now the Zabinski`s will risk their lives on hiding Jews despite knowing the consequences if they get caught.
We have seen movies that have delt with the theme with holocaust in a mediocre way and for momets cheezy. Yes, “The Zookeper`s Wife” has those moments but at the same time I give credit of a movie that is well told and most of it is from Antonina`s point of view.
The script written by Angela Workman, who adapted Diane Ackerman`s book of the same name got into detail and tell`s the perspective of the war in Poland but from another angle that has never been seen and that`s one of the things that I consider interesting about this film.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eiEfrA6MWs4The movie still deals with a very delicate subject matter and this theme is not an easy one to bring to the big screen due to the realism and the suffering that was involved.
The directing by Niki Caro was sharp and I liked the way how she manage the tension in the most crucial scenes of the film. There were moments that I felt Chastain`s performance was a little bit overacted but other than that Caro was very smart on the direction she gave to her cast, specially Daniel Brühl who gives a very interesting performance as a two faced man and you really believed his role.
I felt the movie was by moments slow and too long. I think that a movie like this could have been told in less than two hours and other elements of the film were not necessary to be told but I guess they wanted to fill the movie with too many clichés.
The cinematography of Andrij Parekh was very well executed and the how he portrayed the contrast of before, during and after the war were very interesting as well as the score composed by Harry Gregson-Williams, which I liked who the musical cues were used in the moments where tension begin to built the most.
I enjoyed the movie but I could have enjoyed even more if some elements could have been avoid,l ike the ones I previously mentioned.
I do think the movie could have more potential to become even better of the result that I saw in the screen but still I accept it.
“The Zookeper`s Wife” it`s a hard movie to watch and be prepared in all the aspects before you watchi this film. I do recommend it but it could have had a better execution if the clichés would have been avoided.