A Romanian gem
Gruber's Journey
A gripping tale set in Bucharest during the Second World War.
Co-written by award winning Razvan Radulescu (The Death of Mr Lazarescu) and directed by the veteran Radu Gabrea, who has been making films for close to forty years, Gruber's Journey (2008) is an absorbing tragi-comedy set in war-torn Eastern Europe. It's based on the novel Kaputt (1944) by Italian author Curzio Malaparte, who is also the protagonist of the story.
Set in Iasi at the time of one of the most violent pogroms in Jewish history, Kaputt is a critical account of the deportation and murder of thousands of Romanian Jews. The book was condemned by the Roman Catholic Church and placed on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum upon publication.
Making this web of meta-fiction all the more interesting is that Malaparte was initially a member of the Italian Fascist Party, a friend of Mussolini's and a war correspondent attached to the Wehrmacht troops. As a writer and journalist, he became increasingly critical of both Mussolini and Hitler, culminating in his 1931 novel Tecnica del Colpo di Stato after which he was stripped of his National Facist Party membership and exiled for 5 years on the island of Lipari.
After personal intervention by Mussolini's son-in-law, in 1941 he was sent to cover the Eastern Front as a correspondent for the Italian daily newspaper Corriere della Sera. It was here that he conceived his two most famous books, The Skin (1949) and Kaputt.
In Kaputt and Gruber's Journey, the main character is an Italian war correspondant who becomes incapacitated by a severe allergy while on his way to the warfront. He sets out to find the Jewish Dr. Josef Gruber who is the only doctor who may be able to cure him. Only when Malaparte arrives in Iasi, the doctor is nowhere to be found.
What follows is a Kafkaesque story as the frustrated and congested Fascist attempts to locate Dr. Gruber. The local Romanians are unable to reveal the doctor's whereabouts as that would imply a level of knowledge and culpability that none are willing to assume.
Gruber's Journey screens at ACMI on Sunday 16 August at 6.15pm. Click here for more details on booking your tickets.
Published Thursday, 6 August 2009
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