In the late 1980s, an Englishman who saved 669 Jewish children from the Nazis lived with remorse for not having saved more.
Guest on the popular British show That’s Life In 1988, Nicholas Winton, a retired English broker, discovered with emotion that the thirty people attending the show were the Jewish children he helped flee Prague by train in 1938, in the face of the Nazi threat. Today, there are an estimated 5,000 descendants of those we call “Nicky’s children”. From time to time, this tear-jerking extract resurfaces on social networks and immediately goes viral.
One Life (A life, in French version), by James Hawes, director experienced in television films (Enid) and TV series (Doctor Who), tells part of the life of this courageous man, played by a skin-deep Anthony Hopkins, and how his heroic actions were discovered by his wife Grete (Lena Olin, frozen) 50 years after the fact. Based on the book If It’s Not Impossible…: The Life of Sir Nicholas Wintonpublished by his daughter Barbara Winton in 2014, for the 105th birthday of the man nicknamed the “British Schindler”, the film also reconstructs in an applied manner the extract from That’s Life.
PHOTO JULIE VRABELOVA, PROVIDED BY VVS FILMS
Johnny Flynn in A lifeby James Hawes
Written by Lucinda Coxon (Danish Girlby Tom Hooper) and Nick Drake (Romulus, My Fatherby Richard Roxburgh), One Life follows in parallel Winton in the twilight of his life and in his thirties (Johnny Flynn, honest) living with his mother (Helena Bonham Carter, caricature). Alas! Hawes is no Steven Spielberg. Very conventional in style, the film broadly underlines the guilt of the man haunted by the memory of the children he was unable to save from the hands of the Nazis and the idealism of the young broker ready to move heaven and earth. earth to achieve the impossible. In short, for the nuance, we will come back.
Moreover, as soon as Winton prepares to dive back into his past, the syrupy music of Volker Bertelmann, Oscar winner for the powerful soundtrack ofAll Quiet on The Western Front (Edward Berger), dictates the spectator’s emotions without finesse. Worse still, the dull and repetitive scenes relating the daily life of the retired broker are followed by sequences where we recreate the refugee camps in Prague, with cute children with fawn eyes, as if it were a film Hallmark revisiting a little-known page of the Holocaust. Sir Nicholas Winton, his allies and his protégés deserved much better than this tearful and anecdotal film.
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Biographical drama
One Life (VF: A life)
James Hawes
Anthony Hopkins, Johnny Flynn, Helena Bonham Carter
1h50