Edges Of The Lord

During the German occupation of Poland, two Jewish parents drill their 12 year-old, Romek (Hale Joel Osment), in the rudiments of the Catholic faith so he can be passed off as the child of a sympathetic gentile farmer, Gniecio (Olaf Lubaszenko). Although the parish priest (Willem Dafoe) shields the Jewish youngster’s identity, his pupils resent the outsider’s superior knowledge of Catechism class. Romek bonds with Gniecio’s simple-minded son, Tolo (Liam Hess), but Tolo’s older brother, Vladek (Richard Banel), eyes Romek with resentment. Despite German edicts, Gniecio and his brutish neighbor, Kluba (Andrzej Grabowski), attempt to earn much-needed money by selling a pig. After the transaction, Gniecio is killed — apparently by the Nazis — and his payment confiscated; Kluba escapes. With his fiercest protector murdered, Romek begins to crack under the pressure of living a lie. Tolo deals with his grief by retreating into the Priest’s bible stories, which he badgers his less religious buddies into re-enacting. But the local teenaged thugs would rather harass and rob the Jews who manage to jump off concentration camp-bound trains. The Priest confronts Kluba about the suspicious circumstances of the slaying, and Kluba threatens to blow the whistle about giving sanctuary to Jews. After overhearing this damning conversation, Romek gains Vladek’s undying trust by fingering Kluba as Gniecio’s killer. While Vladek plots to avenge his father’s death, Romek dupes the Nazis into thinking he’s Hitler Youth Material. In the midst of Romek’s life-or-death masquerade, Tolo starts wondering whether the martyrdom of Christ holds the key to restoring peace to his village.

International co-productions often suffer from a the fact that many actors are working in their second or third languages, but the film's larger problem is that director/screenwriter Yurak Bogayevicz treats his innocent protagonists as conceptual pawns rather than three-dimensional human beings. leave a comment --Robert Pardi