The Truce
by David Chute
Hollywood Reporter, April 24, 1998.
In The Truce, Francesco Rosi achieves something amazing: he's made a big, extroverted historical drama, complete with vast landscapes and swarms of extras, that also succeeds in evoking the most fragile, constantly shifting emotional states of its characters. The Truce has an authentic spiritual dimension, a passion to separate the essential from the ephemeral in its exploration of human nature.
Based upon Primo Levi's classic memoir La Tregua (published in English as "The Reawakening'), an account of the author's circuitous journey home to Italy after his liberation from Auschwitz in 1945, The Truce gets its strongest effects in some of its gentlest moments—like the expression of personal triumph on a man's face as he hands a precious slab of bread to a friend; realizing at that moment that despite all he's been through his humanity hasn't been obliterated.
Levi, a research chemist by profession, described the experience of imprisonment and liberation with ferocious precision in three books, which include Survival in Auschwitz and Moments of Reprieve in addition to The Reawakening. Only a few scenes here depict the camps in operation, and then only in brief flashbacks. But their soul-squeezing atmosphere is vividly evoked in the behavior and the body language of the newly liberated prisoners.
Francesco Rosi has always had a special gift for using landscapes and enclosed architectural spaces expressively: the enveloping official corridors of Illustrious Corpses (1976), the oddly canted perspectives of a sun-baked village perched on a mountaintop in Christ Stopped at Eboli (1979). In The Truce, a journey from the cramped gray chambers of Aischwitz into the desolate expanse of post-war Europe, snaking across half the continent, deep into Russia and back out again, on foot and by train, mirrors the expansion of constricted human spirits.
The larger mysteries of Levi's life, the evolution of the clenched prisoner of the memoirs into the acclaimed writer of the playful essays and metafictional tales of The Periodic Table and The Monkey's Wrench, not to mention the forces that drove him to suicide in 1987, are beyond the scope of this film, and perhaps of any film. But we do see the beginnings of the process, and what's more, we feel them.
Rosi's sensuous approach to the medium turns out to be a perfect match for this material because so much of Levi's struggle to reconnect with the world is visual. Words like "seeing" or even "observing" just don't measure up to the urgency of Levi's gaze; he seems to be interrogating reality, trying to peer all the way down into it, mining it for secrets that can help him reawaken
John Turturro, as Levi, damps his trademark eruptive energy way down; the force of his personality remains, but as an impacted ember of intelligence. Speaking English with a soft Italian accent, Turturro shows us the desperate intensity of Primo's watchfulness. "You are a scientist," a friend tells him. "You notice things," and its a description not of a personality trait but also of the vocation Levi discovered at Auschwitz, to become a "witness" to the Holocaust. Where other prisoners burn their camp uniforms and seek to purge the experience from memory, Levi carefully saves his numbered prison shirt and wears it always under his new clothes.
There are aspects of Levi's account, especially its questing analytical intelligence, that don't come across as powerfully here as they do in print. When Turturro is required to recite some of Levi's written observations as lines of dialog, his otherwise fine and fluid performance stiffens up.
The Truce is a great film in its ultimate effects, if not in every last detail. The decision to film the story in English, to build the film linguistically around Turturro, puts some of the European actors in supporting roles in an uncomfortable position, struggling with pronunciation when they should be living in the characters. Massimo Ghini, as Primo's ebullient buddy Cesere, and Agnieszka Wagner, as a radiant dumpling of a Russian nurse, who plays a key role in the reawakening of Levi's senses, rise to the occasion. But the Yugoslavian actor Rade Serbedzija turns one of Levi's pivotal traveling companions, a domineering shrewd operator known only as The Greek, into a sub-Zorba stereotype.
In this context, though, all particular complaints are quibbles. What matters most about The Truce is that Rosi's magnificent film is altogether worthy of its subject.
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