When I caught Amir Bar-Lev’s Fighter (opening at the Coolidge Corner this Friday, November 23) at last year’s Newport Film Festival, it was staggering on jelly legs, having been rebuffed by a host of prestigious film festivals, including Sundance. But a much-deserved triumph at Newport for Best Documentary started a late-round comeback. Suddenly, film festivals everywhere were asking to show this wonderful movie, and First Run Features was agreeing to distribute it. Something I wrote in passing in the Phoenix became part of the early publicity: that the running conversations between Czech-Jewish American emigres Jan Wiener and Arnoŝt Lustig — concerning history, philosophy, politics, family, morality — are the most savory and inspired in a film since the over-supper chit-chat 15 years ago between Wally Shawn and Andre Gregory in My Dinner with Andre.

Several Fighter viewings hence, I stick to my hyperbole about the energizing pleasure in eavesdropping on discourse this brilliant, funny, and enlightening. The kind of mini-parable with which Milan Kundera self-consciously salts The Unbearable Lightness of Being is what tumbles naturally from the lips of our two protagonists.

Let me introduce them as they appear in the movie. Arnoŝt Lustig, 72, is a teacher at American University and a much-published novelist who faces life with a crinkly-eyed smile and is amused by mankind’s vulnerabilities and failings as much as by our heroic successes. A concentration-camp survivor, he served in Czechoslavakia’s post-war Communist bureaucracy, though his Marxist idealism was put to test as he became aware of the horrors perpetrated by the Stalinist government. He avows that he never sold anyone out, and Wiener believes this about him. Nevertheless, he paid lip service to the Communist regime. A man needs to eat, to get by.

Or does he? Not if he’s Jan Wiener, the compulsive "fighter" of the title. He’s 78, lean and mean, Errol Flynn–handsome, with a beautiful snowy mane and moustache, and he’s spent a lifetime refusing to back down about anything anywhere. While Lustig worked and resided in Communist Prague, Wiener was breaking rocks in a harsh Czech prison. A pilot battling Hitler for Britain’s Royal Air Force, he was arrested after the war when he went home to Czechoslovakia — framed by Communist police, who accused him of spying for England. Wiener being Wiener, he wouldn’t sign a paper admitting anything, even as he was beaten and jailed.

And this is the essential debate between these septuagenarians: can a life be led totally without compromise? For Lustig, small accommodations are part and parcel of being in civilization. For Wiener, principle is everything, at all times, and there’s no place in his heart for forgiveness of transgressors, even as the years pass. So Lustig is reminded forever by an accusatory Wiener that he was "part of the club" in the Czech 1950s: guilty, guilty!

They have been great friends in the United States, but their amity crumbles on camera in the process of traveling to Europe to make Fighter. Lustig and Wiener had signed on to participate in a road-movie documentary, retracing Wiener’s Hitchcockian escape in the 1940s from the Germans, in which among other happenings he fled through Italy riding underneath a train. As they travel from Prague southward, the two quarrel bitterly. Somewhere in Italy, Wiener abruptly divorces himself from the movie. A saddened Lustig has the final thought: "Fighters are good in time of war, maybe not in time of peace, We are too different for friendship."

I SPENT WONDERFUL NIGHTS at this year’s Boston Jewish Film Festival, which was perhaps the best ever. But one terrific movie that was passed on, Keep On Walking: Joshua Nelson, the Jewish Gospel Singer, had its debut at the 2001 Northampton Film Festival, where it won Best Documentary and enraptured its packed audience. It’s the story of an amazing-voiced African-American gospel singer who’s also a deeply religious Jew. He prepares New Jersey kids for their bar and bat mitzvahs. I encourage the Boston Jewish Film Festival to bring this important ecumenical work to town, and the charismatic Nelson also, for an accompanying concert.

Another Northampton coup: the East Coast premiere of the hilarious silent Harold Lloyd comedy Speedy, with a sharp comic cameo from Babe Ruth and a delightful-as-always original score by Boston’s Alloy Orchestra. The Alloy and Speedy come to the Somerville Theatre a week from Sunday, December 2.

Issue Date: November 22 - 29, 2001

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