B+Directed by Sam Blair and Joe Martin Review by Jon Kissel |  |
The title of Sam Blair and Joe Martin's documentary Keep Quiet comes from an interview they conduct with a survivor of the Auschwitz death machine. She returned to her Hungarian home after the war, and found that the titular maxim was the best thing for her and her remaining family in a country that Adolph Eichmann said, at his trial, contained the most exuberant collaborators in rounding up Jews. She so closely stuck to her rules that her grandson, Csanad Szegedi, would help found a successful anti-Semitic fascist party in Hungary. Szegedi would live well into adulthood before he would take notice of the serial number tattoo on his grandmother's forearm. Keep Quiet is a bracing film with a foot in the present and a foot in the past, a reminder that the latter always informs the former. It's also a fascinatingly relevant picture of right-wing extremism, of the coded language and skillful, noxious messaging that continues to tap into the body politic's worst impulses.
Blair and Martin catch up with Szegedi shortly after he discovers his heritage. Footage of him riding a train to visit Auschwitz puts him in a compartment with another survivor, and his equivocating and horrifying questions mark him as someone slowly awakening from a long nightmare of hate. The directors fill in his professional history with his days as a firebreathing racist and anti-Semite. The party he helps found, Jobbik, grows out of a paramilitary organization complete with jackboots and flag-waving, and after a mere three election cycles, has put its people in a fifth of Hungary's parliamentary seats. Eventually outed by a skinhead who admires 'military culture and certain traditions' in his own guarded words, Szegedi is initially treated as an asset by Jobbik's leadership, a shield against charges of anti-Semitism brought against a party that regularly invites Holocaust deniers to speaking events. However, the messaging game gets bungled and Szegedi is forced out, diagnosed with what he defines as the 'terminal illness' of Jewish-ness.
Stripped of his political identity, Szegedi reluctantly tries to find a new one in his Jewish heritage. His father's 'pure' Hungarian side always occupied a large part of his sense of himself, to the point that he never considered his mother's. Blair and Martin capture Szegedi reevaluating and ruing instances from his childhood, like the look of silent despair that washed over his mother's face when a young Szegedi told her a Holocaust joke. Szegedi gradually moves towards embracing his Jewish identity, but he finds himself in the nationalist's nightmare of being a man without a country. Rejected both by his former comrades and Jews who are justifiably skeptical of any conversion, Szegedi is left to wander the wilderness and wonder how he went down this road in the first place.
Keep Quiet is one of those documentaries that finds a subject ripe for adaptation, packaging a redemptive arc into a pleasing structure and sending the viewer on their way with a soothing hope for the future. To Blair and Martin's credit, they get that events are never that simple. Keep Quiet finds one man who might learn a better way amongst a nation that keeps repeating its past. It seems like a drop in the ocean amongst Jobbik's rising poll numbers and the illiberal nature of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban's rhetoric. It's not like every Jobbik apparatchik is going to find a Jewish branch in their family tree. Keep Quiet's mildly hopeful, but mostly, it's a chilling snapshot of problems that refuse to go away. B+
Stripped of his political identity, Szegedi reluctantly tries to find a new one in his Jewish heritage. His father's 'pure' Hungarian side always occupied a large part of his sense of himself, to the point that he never considered his mother's. Blair and Martin capture Szegedi reevaluating and ruing instances from his childhood, like the look of silent despair that washed over his mother's face when a young Szegedi told her a Holocaust joke. Szegedi gradually moves towards embracing his Jewish identity, but he finds himself in the nationalist's nightmare of being a man without a country. Rejected both by his former comrades and Jews who are justifiably skeptical of any conversion, Szegedi is left to wander the wilderness and wonder how he went down this road in the first place.
Keep Quiet is one of those documentaries that finds a subject ripe for adaptation, packaging a redemptive arc into a pleasing structure and sending the viewer on their way with a soothing hope for the future. To Blair and Martin's credit, they get that events are never that simple. Keep Quiet finds one man who might learn a better way amongst a nation that keeps repeating its past. It seems like a drop in the ocean amongst Jobbik's rising poll numbers and the illiberal nature of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban's rhetoric. It's not like every Jobbik apparatchik is going to find a Jewish branch in their family tree. Keep Quiet's mildly hopeful, but mostly, it's a chilling snapshot of problems that refuse to go away. B+
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