New films on Marie Curie and Stefan Zweig (notes from 2017 NY Jewish Film Festival)

New films on Marie Curie and Stefan Zweig viewed at New York Jewish Film Festival

It is worth hoping, and expecting as I do, that Marie Noelle’s new film “Marie Curie: The Courage of Knowledge” will receive commercial distribution stateside or at least in New York and LA, as French films of this quality usually do. The film is beautiful shot and Karolina Gruszka as the Nobel Prize winning chemist is extraordinary. As the title announces, the film is partly a paean to the practice of scientific research through Curie’s passionate devotion to it, and also to the education in it of her daughter, who, an announcement of future events at the film’s end informs us, will go on to win the third Chemistry Nobel awarded to a woman after her mother’s twain. If we have to have identity politics-based film festivals, this film belongs less in a Jewish Film Festival than a Woman’s Festival, particularly under the heading, “Women Who Made It Professionally,” a topic that would have had real political meaning in my mother’s generation half a century ago. Which is to say that the film, like its heroine, has no politics. What she shows is a quietly passionate determination that involves taking for granted the propriety of what she wants. This is what unites her work and personal life. Lacking all ressentiment, she responds to insults from the numerous men with obnoxious chauvinistic attitudes by ignoring them; at least one instance sticks in my memory of her turning abruptly about-face and departing down a staircase. If she is less of a Kantian than a Spinozist or Nietzschean as befits perhaps a French director making a film 50 years after May ’68, and so not much given to pangs of guilt, though she does weep bitterly after the accidental death near the beginning (the film stretches between her twin Nobel Prizes) of her beloved husband Pierre, something of a male muse to her, perhaps this explains the blindness of her willful insouciance to the situation of her married lover and his insanely jealous wife. And yet the film suggests that this could be a moral flaw in a more ordinary person, but – well, make of this what you will: as is well-known, the French love their great minds and are a bit more ready than us Anglo-Saxons to forgive erotic transgressions. The killer wife, like the paleo-masculine scientists who seem like caricatures by our lights, is a negative externality; the story hasn’t room for guilt. Anti-semitism enters the picture with the journalists who vilify her for the affair and, we suspect, also because of their hostility to female professionals who, as she would in fact, become like Gods knowing about things that can be used for good or evil and being enshrined post-mortem in the Pantheon. In Europe not long after Dreyfus, it is natural to toss out the allegation that she is, to top it off, a Jew (which, in fact, she was not). It is hard to make a successful film that is realistic in the story’s basis and in style while also being narrativally a bit of an adult fairy tale with all its enchantment. Including, of course, the obstacles faced and overcome by the heroine, who, the title informs us, is courageous in the pursuit of knowledge. Women, bring your young daughters to this film as Ms. Gruszka does when delivering a rousing speech on accepting Nobel Deux.

A very different film in the same New York Jewish Film Festival is “Stefan Zweig: Farewell to Europe” by German actress and now cineaste Maria Schrader. This is the portrait of the famous Austrian Jewish novelist Stefan Zweig in exile during the Third Reich in Brazil, with sojourns to Argentina and New York. The focus of the film is on the world-weary Zweig’s manner of insisting on adapting to his adopted milieus as best he can while cultivating a judicious caution with regard to public statements about Germany. Repeatedly we see him making what may be moral compromises, and always there is a thick air of irony and ambiguity about the decisions he makes. This is not a man with youthful enthusiasm and an impulsive bent for making provocative statements. That the film is both talky and deliberately paced befits its subject. We are shown nothing of his writing, nor do we see him at work writing, an opposite choice of the one Noelle makes with Curie. Here is a man who could not really adjust to the life of exile that so many European thinkers and artists were driven to in those years. He is full of praise for Brazil and the village to which he has relocated, but when his suicide note is read we see that he was always a concealed duality. As exemplary as Curie’s triumphs is Zweig’s tragedy here.