Twice, French writer and director Gerald Garutti observes that the luck that saved the life of Holocaust survivor Haim Lipsky was also killing him. The first time was when Lipsky - still in his teens - found a job in Lodz ghetto burying the bodies of his fellow Jews. The second was when, in Auschwitz, he found himself in a room full of instruments,was handed a violin by the German officer, and told to play. The Mendelssohn didn't go down well, yet he passed the audition for the camp orchestra and survived his time there by serenading death.
Without that precocious talent, nurtured by the village shoemaker, Lipsky would not have become the patriarch of an Israeli family of international musicians - a life-affirming uplift to Lipsky's story which, now he is in his 90s, is happily still unfolding. His is an epic tale condensed by Garutti into an artful, uninterrupted one-and-a-half hours for which music is as crucial as the subject.
Israeli violinist Yair Benaim represents Haim's talent. And with occasional acting gestures (you get the feeling he wouldn't want to go much further than that) he conveys the man himself, as well. It's a performance that begins with Benaim standing as a bewildered figure, holding a bow in his right hand, a violin in his left, and attempting, it seems, to make sense of how these two objects protected him from the gas chambers. The answer comes when he plays - Bloch, as well as Mendelssohn, and, later, plenty of equally life-affirming Klezmer, too, accompanied by clarinettist Samuel Maquin, accordionist Alexis Kune and Dana Ciocarlie on the piano. Much of the evening - as much a concert as anything - is given over to these superb musicians, Hitler's invasion of Poland heralded with sudden and frightening clash of chords played by Ciocarlie.
But the telling of Lipsky's story is undertaken by the charismatic French film actress Mélanie Doutey who swishes around the stage in a flowing raincoat in the role of narrator. She vividly described Jewish life in "Yiddishland" and Lipsky's first encounter with the Kelzmer musicians - the spark that grew into an obsession.
This isn't the first time that a Holocaust story has been told with virtuoso music. Concert pianist Mona Golabek recently told the story of her mother's deliverance from Germany on the Kindertransport. And, like that production, Haim: In the Light of the Violin soars on virtuosic musicianship.
As for Douety, inhabiting a story - as opposed to a character - can be as demanding on an audience as a performer. But, if she were reciting a train timetable, Doutey has the kind of open face that invites close listening. The prose is over-romanticised at times. And sometimes I felt as if I were being presented with a pitch for a more detailed, epic film. But it would be a film with unforgettable scenes, such as that room in Auschwitz in which Lipsky once stood, and played for his life.
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