The Shop on Main Street

I had The Shop on Main Street sitting on my DVR for a while, I think since 31 Days of Oscar, and recently watched it to do a post on it, not having done a post on a foreign (well, non-English-language) film in a while.

First, a bit of history. People probably remember how the Nazis demanded the Sudetenland from Czechoslovakia in the fall of 1938, several months later, Nazis marched into the country, turning the Czech lands -- Bohemia and Moravia -- into a protectorate, which is how Reinhard Heydrich wound up in the country to be killed in Operation Anthropoid as depicted in movies like Hangmen Also Die. As for the Slovak third of the country, it was turned into a puppet state that was probably even less independent than the communist states after World War II would be. Needless to say, Slovakia was going to have to implement the same anti-Jewish and other racial laws that Nazi Germany already had.

In a small town somewhere in the eastern part of the country, the process of "Aryanization" is beginning to go into full swing. The fascist authorities are insisting that Jews can no longer own businesses, expropriating the property and giving it to Aryan (well, Slavs, since as I understand it the Nazi Germans considered Slavs not as good as the "pure" Aryan Germans) owners. Tono Brtko (Jozef Kroner) is a poor carpenter in town who has a brother-in-law in a position of power with the town's authorities. The brother-in-law informs Tono that he is to be given control of a local notions store run by the elderly Jewish widow Lautmannová (Ida Kamińska), not that Tono knows anything about running a store, especially not this kind of store.

Tono is more the sort of person who just wants to survive, not really wanting to work with the fascist authorities but also not wanting to join any resistance. More importantly, he still has a conscience. What he finds when he sets foot in the shop surprises him. Lautmannová is going deaf and is also probably in the early stages of dementia, not understanding why she's getting someone to run the shop, and certainly not understanding the danger she and her fellow Jews are in. Tono also discovers that the shop is a money-losing proposition, with Lautmannová living off donations that the rest of the Jewish community gives to her. So much for the hopes of Tono's wife, who would like an income stream.

So Tono takes his job seriously, trying to repair things in the house, and even trying to be a co-worker, not that he as a man knows the first thing about sewing notions. He also grows to like poor Lautmannová, even if he can find her exasperating at times, as anybody who has had to deal with a relative with dementia would know.

But change is coming even to this relatively isolated corner of the world, as can be seen throughout the movie by the progress being made on the building of a tower dedicated to the glory of the new government. And soon enough, the local government, which is anti-Semitic in itself althoguh it's also following orders from the central government, brings in a bunch of rail cars that are an obvious sign to anyone with half a brain. The government is going to deport the Jews to what they're calling "work camps", although it's obviously a concentration camp and more likely an extermination camp. After all, what would a work camp want with an old lady like Lautmannová?

Tono doesn't know what to do, but tries to hide Lautmannová. She, on the other hand, won't have any of that, since this is all happening on Shabbat wen all the Jews are supposed to be doing no work, and because with her dementia she can't really perceive of the annihilation of the Jews. She's perfectly happy just staying in the house, not realizing that it would require the authorities dragging her out at gunpoint. And Tono begins to think that perhaps his brother-in-law deliberately gave him control of the shop so that when he tried to stop the deportation, it would get him arrested and allow the brother-in-law to take it over then, something he apparently couldn't do directly.

The Shop on Main Street is a well-made story, although it does have some of the sorts of touches non-Hollywood movies do that may be a bit tough for people already put off by the thought of having to read subtitles. The additional fact Lautmannová has dementia also makes her act in a way that might at times aggravate viewers as much as it does poor Tono. It's also a bit slow, as the story probably could have been done in a brisk 90 minutes as opposed to the 128-minute movie we have. But these are all relatively minor flaws in an otherwise rewarding movie. That's definitely worth a watch.