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My Neighbour Adolf

This is a neat little 'Is he or isn't he?' comedy-drama about an elderly Jewish man living in the Colombian countryside who comes to believe that Adolf Hitler has moved in next door. Director (and co-writer) Leon Prudovsky opens this Israeli/Polish co-production in Germany in 1934, then swiftly time-jumps to 1960, just after the capture of Adolf Eichmann in Argentina.

The premise is faintly ridiculous but mixing potential farce with holocaust themes is brave, to say the least. Mr. Plonsky lives a fairly ascetic lifestyle, and crucially, alone (the flashback opening shows him with a large family), when he is made aware of a buyer, a Mr. Herzog, for the rundown house next to his rundown house. He's a proper misery-guts, the only thing he seems to care about are the black roses in his patchy garden - a nice visual link to the past. Imagine then, the shit that hits the fan (well, hand) when he finds that his new neighbour's dog (German Shepherd, obviously) has been messing with the flowers. It's during the resulting confrontation that Plonsky realises he's living next to the Fuhrer.

David Hayman (Plonsky) and Udo Kier (Herzog/Hitler) are really understated, even quite melancholy, while the other satellite characters - including Olivia Silhavy as Herzog's assistant Frau Kaltenbrunner, and Kineret Peled as an Israeli intelligence officer - play things a tick broader. There are a couple of nice little touches that make this a cut above the average. Plonsky is collecting books on Hitler to gather research when the bookstore attendant surreptitiously hands over a copy of Mein Kampf; Plonsky's amateur surveillance of Herzog reveals his height, eye colour and artistic bent, but not (yet) his lack of one testicle; simple close-ups of sliding eyehole slots and antique buzzers on wooden doors, crappy metal cups for vodka, and egg shells being crushed give this an authentic look, not to mention the functional but funky looking chess sets.

But the key point in the film is how they deal with the crux of the issue - is he, or isn't he, Hitler? During the course of Plonsky's 'investigation', the two men strike up a kind of rapprochement, mainly over games of chess, and at one point he comes to believe he may have got it all wrong. Until he overhears something that swings the pendulum back the other way. I'll say no more, only that the climax is completely satisfying and somewhat believable too. Well worth your time.

My Neighbour Adolf starts at the Luna on April 27th

See also:

Chris Weitz's Operation Finale (2018) is a tense film about Eichmann's capture, and Udo Kier is in the underrated Shadow of the Vampire (2000), directed by E. Elias Merhige. [David Hayman is also in Time of the Eagle (1979) about Nazi refugees hiding in South America, but I haven't seen it, I just thought it was a coincidence.]

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