In ‘The Flat,’ a family’s secrets are too difficult to bear
To give too much information about the secret at the center of the excellent documentary The Flat would rob audience members of the truly shocking nature of this Arnon Goldfinger-directed piece. Involving survivors of World War II, the film stands as a testament to the therapeutic and painful effect of discovering the truth about loved ones. The documentary, which played the Tribeca Film Festival and will be released on DVD next year, is a cautionary tale: Be careful when beginning to ask questions about the past. You never know what you might discover.
Goldfinger has made a deeply personal film about his journey to understand the objects left behind in his 98-year-old grandmother’s apartment in Tel Aviv. While the camera shows him sifting through the history, it becomes quite obvious that we’re not watching a traditional documentary. In some ways, The Flat takes some time to realize it will become a documentary at all. Instead, there’s a wonderful home-video quality to Goldfinger’s lens, as if his sense of discovery is a true sense of discovery. He doesn’t know how this story will unfold; there’s no beginning, middle and end, just question marks and an unsettling feeling about what the future holds.
Without spoiling the details, the movie delves into the issue of forgiveness — not so much how to forgive, but how we can come to understand how others are able to forgive. With a dramatic situation like the Holocaust and the rise of Nazi Germany, it’s almost impossible to imagine the level of violence and anguish in war-torn Europe. The survivors tell us their stories so that we may learn from their experiences, but there is no real understanding of what they endured. How can anyone fathom the atrocities of the Nazis? How can anyone build a new life after the depravity of eastern Europe? The Flat doesn’t answer these weighty questions, but it gets rather close to the answer. We watch Goldfinger constantly inspecting (with respect and honest curiosity) for answers, and we vicariously live through his searching. We want to know the truth. We want to understand how his family and others were changed.
However, this cinematic quest, which takes Goldfinger from Tel Aviv to Germany, is never exploitative of the story or his grandmother. Instead it feels like a pure journey for a person wishing to appreciate the evolution of his relatives.
The Flat has a payoff that feels cinematic, mostly because of its shocking attributes. But there is never one time when watching the film that Goldfinger plays to the camera or heightens the tension to an unbelievable level. This story is that dramatic. The time period depicted in Germany is that mind-boggling.
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
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The Flat
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2012
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Written and directed by Arnon Goldfinger
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Running time: 97 minutes
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Not Rated
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Rating:
