The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is so fraught and thorny most filmmakers these days who are not of Israeli or Palestinian heritage or from somewhere nearby the region generally tend to steer clear of all the loaded burdens and pitfalls. Versatile filmmaker Michael Winterbottom, however, is braver and/or has less compunction about that—for better and perhaps for worse. He has found another lesser-known entry point into the story, which is Mandatory Palestine, a period in history between WWI and WWII (1920-1948) when the British were in control of Palestine, and their intercession and mistakes arguably led to many of the problems that still linger in the regions today.
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Within this troubled setting—not unlike the United States’ role in Afghanistan and Iraq, where a brutal intervention as an occupying presence only does harm in the end—Winterbottom, his regular collaborating writer Laurence Coriat (“Wonderland,” “Genova”), and Paul Viragh, craft a story about star-crossed lovers, an anxious political tumult, radicalization and extremism. It’s essentially a love story that also traces the origins of a deeply complex conflict that rages on to this day.
Some of it works, some of it doesn’t. And in a sign of how complicated some of it gets (and therefore sometimes dull), “Shoshana” begins with a factual-based history lesson in its opening credits detailing historical dates about the history of Palestine (“The treaty of Versailles gives control of Palestine to the British in 1918”).
Furthermore, in 2023, given the ideas of empathy and seeing and hearing people, it seems awfully tone-deaf to make a movie about Israelis, Palestinians, and the English, and have the Arab perspective be little more than faceless, nameless characters that are shoved to the margins and/or abused the whole time, even if they didn’t have much of a seat at the political table.
The characters fall into three categories essentially. The English (bullish and militant, generally favoring the Zionist perspective and treating the Arab community as savages), the extremists (a militant Zionist group named Lehi and its members), and those trying to do the right thing in the midst of it all (a mix of English and Israelis; and four, if you count the virtually non-existent Palestinian people).
This latter group is where the story merges and begins. It’s 1938, and anxiety runs high in Tel Aviv, a-then brand new European Jewish city built on the Mediterranean’s shores. As the British struggle to manage the tensions between the coexisting Palestinians and Jews (Israel was not formed until 1949, so no one is technically an Israeli yet), English police officer Thomas Wilkin (Douglas Booth) is like a rare bird within it all. He has taken quite a shine to the city and looks like he may put down roots with no interest in coming home.
While most groups in Tel-Aviv don’t intermingle, Thomas’ understanding of the region, its people, and his empathy are likely the reason he’s madly in love with Shoshana (excellent newcomer Irina Starshenbaum, who easily steals the movie), and she with him. A fiercely scrappy, idealist, leftist-leaning, independent journalist, Shoshana is the daughter of a Zionist Labor movement founder who believed in his heart everyone could peacefully coexist in Palestine, liberal views she holds dearly.
Threatening their affair and budding romance, which isn’t exactly a secret, but not exactly flaunted either given the controversies around it— a Jewish woman sleeping with a British interloper—are the militant Jewish factions, led by Avraham Stern (Aury Alby), and the intransigent British, represented by Wilkin’s obdurate superior Geoffrey Morton (Harry Melling), a man who doesn’t understand the region in the slightest and thus, naturally, is put in charge to police it with his blunt anti-terrorism squad.
Zero-tolerance policies toward any forms of resistance are adopted, and British tactics intensify to include torture. This compels Stern’s radicalized groups to increase their campaigns of bombings, attacks, and other barbaric acts of terrorism that often kill women and children. Violence begets violence, and this, of course, strains the fragile relationship at the movie’s center. Somewhere along the lines, Shoshana— a modern, progressive feminist— is forced to choose between her love for Thomas or her love for her people’s independence, and it might be a better movie if her choices didn’t seem so forgone from the beginning. As violence escalates, anyone on the fence is pushed towards their country of origin, whether they like it or not.
It all makes for a dutifully orchestrated procedural thriller that’s also competently crafted, but a movie like “Shoshana” may only be so compelling when it chafes against its aforementioned lesser elements. Starshenbaum is a star, though; every moment she is on screen, she elevates the movie. The two British leads are less successful, however. While adequate, Booth has yet to blossom in the same way Robert Pattinson eventually transformed when he started working with A-list auteurs. And Melling is a solid actor, but has a unique talent for playing characters so repellent and loathsome he’s either doing it too well or, tellingly, the characters he plays are often just written too one-dimensionally odious (give him “The Pale Blue Eye” at least, though). Unfortunately, his priggish English police officer character is very much in that same prick-you-wanna-punch vein that essentially makes him the one-note villain of the piece.
And polemics and political sympathies aside, not fully Winterbottom’s interests anyhow—his remit is how violence and extremism force decisions on people they might not normally make—the ability of his romantic, political drama to fully engage is somewhat limited, beyond what is a decent pace, sometimes surgical editing and the aforementioned performance by its captivating lead.
Ultimately, “Shoshana,” in the Shakespearean sense, is a tragedy (naturally, given the Romeo and Juliet aspect of its central amour), but it’s bigger than just romance and divided houses. Winterbottom’s film says the true tragedy of conflict is the impossibility of remaining neutral and how the need to take a side eventually is flawed and yet understandably human. There are no winners in war, basically. It’s all ugly and almost always heartbreaking.
It’s a grim, sobering, and all-too-real position; if only the movie itself and its conclusion were as engrossing. Political media watchdogs will likely have many arguments and things to gripe about, but the only thing really worth writing home about, in truth, is the welcome discovery of Starshenbaum, which makes “Shoshana” at least not a total wash. [C+]
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