The Truce

Francesco Rosi, now 87, hasn’t directed a film since this 1997 adaptation of Primo Levi’s The Truce, the Italian author and Holocaust survivor’s memoir of his arduous return home from Auschwitz. “John Turturro gives what may be the screen performance of his career in Rosi's deeply morose film. Portraying Levi, the skinny, snaggletoothed actor taps powerfully into the streak of despairing paranoia that lurks beneath the flashy surfaces of the maniacal hustlers and desperate showoffs he plays so flamboyantly in films by the Coen brothers . . . The Truce opens with Levi’s liberation from the death camp by Russian soldiers and follows his long, circuitous journey by rail and on foot through a series of dingy Soviet-run displaced person camps to his home in Turin . . . The Truce has the sweeping visual grandeur of a historical epic, [but] the story it tells is essentially an interior journey . . . The film is sparsely punctuated by Turturro’s hushed voice-over delivery of reflective fragments from Levi's writing. The quote that resounds most tellingly is one of Levi's most famous observations: 'God cannot exist if Auschwitz exists'" (Stephen Holden, New York Times). “A remarkable picture . . . One more measure of both the humanism and the complex political sensibility in Rosi” (David Thomson). Colour, 35mm, in Italian with English subtitles. 117 mins.