Holy Week (Saptamana Mare, 2024) ‘Sarajevo’ Movie Review: Niftily Blurs the Lines Between the Victim and the Aggressor

In “Holy Week” (Original Title: Saptamana Mare), director Andrei Cohn adapts Luca Caragiale’s novella “The Easter Torch” into a moody, atmospheric drama. The brooding tone of the film is buttressed by the magnificently authentic, lived-in production design, immediately invoking a rich, minute understanding of a discrete world and time. Nevertheless, its protagonist’s complex, swerving emotions and conflicts strike with formidable, timeless specificity. It ceases to be a thing of consideration whether the film’s events are based on a particular kind of past. We may have rolled down many years, but that crucial unease with any form of difference, girdling the film, stays unabated.

At its heart, the film encompasses the slow, lethal, corrosive effects of suspicion and antipathy to the foreign/alien other. How does suspicion lodge itself deep into one’s soul and start virtually reshaping and dramatically impacting the degree of self-preservation? Where does this angst turn into heedless, senseless paranoia, becoming self-mutilating, venomous? When does it get too late before this effect is wholly unsalvageable?

Throughout this intriguing film, Cohn traverses myriad questions, all stemming from the discomfort around people who may not share your national, religious, or ethnic affiliation. The thematic explorations unwind with careful deliberation. The film takes its time building and setting up a distinct mood, specifically the kind wherein characters doubt each other’s intentions. The worst type of dread and anxiety is ascribed to a knock at the door in the middle of the night. The precarity of life is pronounced in every moment.

One assumes the bottom worst of a situation that may erupt and snap him or her out of any veneer of stability and illusion of permanence. Transience lingers eerily, with stakes ever present in every choice characters make. Repercussion looms constantly, but the characters don’t exactly keep their eyes peeled. Plunged into a sort of moral chaos, which the screenplay wisely refrains from underlining a whole lot, the characters stumble through a series of disasters, decisions that go horrendously awry and only trigger their own doom.

The film is set in a Romanian village in the 19th century. Leiba ( Doru Bem), the Jewish innkeeper, lives in a persistent fear of being attacked, but that doesn’t dent his arrogance at all. He has a lot of self-possession, which doesn’t bode well for him, especially because he doesn’t seem well-equipped to handle the price of his extreme fears. Gheorghe (Ciprian Chiricheş), his help, keeps testing him, challenging his authority with outright abrasiveness.

Gheorghe is confident he can afford to consistently rattle Leiba because of the insider-outsider power balance. Leiba is effectively his employer, but he’s the rank outsider in the land here, which Gheorghe is not owing to his Romanian roots. Gheorghe keeps pushing his luck a tad too much. Unsurprisingly, not much time elapses before Leiba finally lashes out and mentally flips. The film is essentially tracking this collapse, the gamut of emotions from cynicism to toleration to seething revenge.

It is only a matter of inevitability that Leiba gets sucked into displaying his worst instincts. But it isn’t to say Gheorghe’s foolhardy actions can be wholly arrogated for triggering Leiba’s impending viciousness. With intelligence and a solid contextualizing force, Cohn delineates the rapidly diminishing difference between the perpetrator and the abused. Roles can quickly shift as circumstances exert themselves with cruelty and demanding insinuations. Gheorghe unflaggingly pesters Leiba. The entire village’s apprehension and wariness of outsiders/foreigners, be they Jews, Turks, or Romani people, consign Leiba to the status of a socially suspect individual.

“Holy Week” swoops on the insidious, devastating, cancerous pull of prejudice, xenophobia, and blinding hate. It is full of straying, depleting energy, capable of swaying the beleaguered to inadvertently assume the form and shape of everything he deplores and is afraid of. Propelled by the simmering intensity and caustic power in the exchange between Bem and Chiricheş, the film astutely condenses an unraveling and its fallout.

Holy Week (Saptamana Mare) screened at the Sarajevo Film Festival 2024.

Holy Week (Saptamana Mare, 2024) Movie Link: IMDb