Ben Kingsley Hera Hilmar Peter Serafinowicz
“I will never hide, and I will never be taken”,
states The General (Kingsley), the last one responsible for war crimes in
Czechoslovakia who hasn’t been captured.
The General is being hidden by his loyalists, transported from place to
place for varying lengths of time to keep him away from the authorities. But The General is not easily
corralled; he will not go gently into anonymity. He longs for some stability and thinks maybe he has found it
when his protectors find him an apartment rather than a seedy hotel.
This man is extremely well experienced in
counter intelligence and sniffing out potential enemies. He covers the apartment thoroughly,
examining every inch. But one day
someone uses her own key and lets herself in. He immediately has a gun aimed at her, and she explains that
she is the housekeeper for the previous tenant. He grills her as if it were an interrogation, and her
responses fascinate him. She is
obviously poor, has no parents, family, or boyfriend, to which, he says that
she is like him, a ghost. They
don’t really exist. But he “owns”
her, she is his, and he will pay more for her than her previous employer did.
The attraction between these two is some of the
most interesting material in the film.
Tanja (Hilmar) (or “Maid!” as he calls her) is enigmatic, giving cryptic
answers to his probing questions.
She is about the age of his daughter with whom he no longer has contact,
so an added complication in the story is his identifying Tanja with her. The more silent she is, the more he
projects onto her his perceptions of his own daughter. Subsequently, he asks Tanja surprising
questions and does surprising things for her, and she remains as mysterious to
him as all the women in his life he has known. It’s a challenge to him to “pierce her veil” and discover
who she is. (The association to
his daughter is not to be missed.)
As time goes on, his association of Tonja with
his daughter becomes clearer, as he teaches her to cook, buys her clothes,
advises her, and defies her when he has a different agenda. But she is not to be outdone, and
surprises him at critical times.
Nevertheless, he has his own plans, and seems to take particular delight
in evading those who are charged with capturing him. This very unusual cat and mouse game, where both identities
keep changing, makes the film.
This “ordinary man” may not be so ordinary after all.
Ben Kingsley is well cast as the mischievous,
but very experienced and bright, military man. Hera Hilmar plays her character to a tee, whether it is as
the underprivileged no-life maid or the woman she turns out to be. Writer/director Brad Silberling has
produced an intriguing, playful film that should please those interested in war
stories and devious plots. Ben
Kingsley is delightful as he always is in playing mischievous-authoritarian
characters (not an easy thing to do) with an almost invisible eye to the
camera. Hera Hilmar as the maid-plus
is perfectly cast in her simple, unaffecting beauty and her ability to appear
mysterious and competent at the same time.
A cat and mouse game different from most any
you have seen before.
Grade: B By
Donna R. Copeland
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