Rodrigo Cortés travels to the Warsaw ghetto in ‘Love in His Place’ to claim the role of actor and the humanity of art even in the most difficult circumstances
A virtuous sequence shot of eleven minutes plunges us into the Warsaw ghetto. We follow one of the actresses in a play that is performed in the midst of horror, Nazi extermination, cold and hunger. This is what happened in reality. Life went on in the ghetto, where out of 400,000 Jews only 50,000 survived. The shoemakers continued to mend shoes, the rich ate, the poor died and the theater people tried to get the audience to take their hands out of their pockets overcoming the cold to applaud.
For four weeks, the Fémina theater hosted the performance of a vaudeville with songs that laughed at the daily life of the German occupation: overcrowded families, the corruption of the Jewish police … Rodrigo Cortés is a director who likes challenges , is worth as evidence ‘Buried’, which took place inside a coffin. ‘Love in its place’ takes place in the real time of the performance of the work. Two of the actors have the opportunity to escape from the ghetto. While they decide what to do, they cannot stop acting. On one side of the curtain laughter, on the other an intrigue in which the protagonists risk their lives.
Filmed in English by actors of various nationalities and without a known face in the cast, ‘El amor en su lugar’ refers in its play on and off stage to, of course, ‘To be or not to be’ by Lubitsch. His defense of culture as a chink of humanity and civilization in the midst of chaos is also reminiscent of ‘The pianist’, by Polanski, and even ‘Life is beautiful’, by Roberto Benigni ‘, where a father changed his gaze from his son so that he would not perceive the horror.
With a frenetic pace, brilliantly performed by actors who also know how to sing, ‘El amor en su lugar’ vindicates the beauty of a job that cannot be understood without the audience and defends that even in the worst moments a smile, a joke, can literally , save our lives.
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