Writer: Michael Radford
Director: Annabel Jankel
Based on the true experience of Freddie Knoller, a Holocaust survivor who died in 2022 aged 100, Michael Radford’s Desperate Journey mixes the two primary tropes of civilian movies set in the Second World War featuring both the harsh brutality of the concentration camps and the uber glamorous world of smoky clubs where men and women went to hide from the exigencies of war. Directed by Annabel Jankel, this is an extraordinary tale of ingenuity and an unbelievable ability to survive marred only by a slight lack of jeopardy for the central character and an assumption that its audience automatically know the chronology of the conflict.
When the Austrian Chancellor resigns in 1939, Hitler’s soldiers soon invade the country, brutally murdering Freddies friends and neighbours in Vienna. His noble parents send Freddie’s brother to America and arrange for Freddie to smuggled to England, only a series of disasters along the way send him to Paris where he starts to work at a nightclub. Meanwhile in 1944 as the Allies close in, Freddie is marched from a concentration camp through the woods where he seems unlikely to survive to the end of the war.
Desperate Journey is structured as a look back on his trek across Europe from the perspective of Freddie’s abrupt departure from the concentration camp as German soldiers try to outrun the incoming liberation armies. It is a classic structure, which from a point of pain and near fatal conclusion as he endures trigger happy guards murdering anyone who cannot walk, the collapse of his fellow prisoners from disease and weakness and the freezing conditions created in harsh tones by Jankel, opens out into a much happier (almost) memory of the dazzle of Paris and the luxurious opportunities of the burlesque club.
The club world too is beautifully created, one of the most interesting parts of the film in fact where the story could have lingered a little longer, peopled by beautiful burlesque women selling fantasies and themselves to Nazi officers and anyone who could pay while an angry chef-owner, all kinds of waifs and strays find solace, the French Resistance appear and Freddie is dazzled by the sexiness of it all and owes much to Kander and Ebb’s vision of Cabaret. That both experiences of Freddie Knoller’s war are true is fascinating and credible as he rubs shoulders with the Nazi officers who would certainly kill him if they knew his religion makes for peaks of tension.
Yet, Radford’s script could do more to frame the story in the unfolding experience of the Nazi expansion in Europe in the years after the film begins. The exact timelines become blurry so it’s never clear if Freddie arrives in Paris after the Germany’s invasion in 1940 or whether that occurs during the action, nor what that means for day-to-day life – in is one possibility,that Freddie is in Paris at the same time as Rick and Ilsa from Casablanca. Likewise, later in the film, how many months or years have passed before he is discovered and how does the removal of men from the concentration camp fit with the Allied invasion of Germany and Austria? It matters because it helps to underpin character motivation and what hope they may have of freedom or survival at different times in this story.
Lucas Lynggaard Tønnesen is a good mix of naivety and daring as Freddie who grows up very quickly, although knowledge of his survival in the film’s frame does undercut almost all of the moments of jeopardy with Nazi officers including Til Schweiger’s skull-feeling baddie Kurt. There is far less for the female characters to do, despite a love interest with one of the burlesque performers (Clara Rugaard) but Desperate Journey is a very enjoyable and surprising film about survival against the odds.
Desperate Journey is in cinemas now.
