touches upon two topics, one of them it does not quite dare to follow through

Rating: 9/10 (4 December 2009)

First a little lesson in order for you to understand this review. It concerns minorities in a society of power.
In order to gain and maintain power, masonries were created through history. The idea of a masonry was a kind of conspiracy against the rest of society. The members of the masonry helped each other when times were rough, so that for nobody of them times was ever as rough as those who had no organization to help them, like the majority of people. The masonry of course also helped each other to positions in society, so that if one member reached a high position he quickly used his influence to put other members of the masonry in as high positions as he was capable of furnishing. Skilled members of a masonry were preferred, especially in starting up a masonry, but the better the masonry worked the more it could do with less skilled members as long as absolute loyalty was ensured. In fact, if there was a choice between a member less skilled but more loyal a member more skilled but less loyal, the former was preferred.
Masonries can be describes as "created minorities". If you already belong to a minority, you don't have to create a masonry. Provided that the minority you belong to like each other better than the surrounding majority and provided the minority is not persecuted by the surrounding majority, you will have a functioning masonry and the minority you belong to will slowly, sometimes quickly, rise to power in a power-society. Now, if we take the blacks in USA. They do not rise to power and the reason is simple: they are persecuted, not openly of course, since that is against the law, but insidiously all the time. There is always some excuse for not letting more of them reach power than a certain quota which is needed in order to seem non-racist. If it was not so, then blacks would have more positions in power than whites because that is the inevitable consequence of masonry. Another reason for the failure of the blacks to reach power is that they are easily recognizable and so would easily ignite a racism if there were too many of them in power. Not so with Jews, for instance, who are so like other whites that the Nazis were forced to put a David-star on them in order not to confuse them with other whites.
Between masonry and non-masonry there is a vast landscape of "buddies", "contacts" and what not. They all have the same purpose: to gain and maintain power. That's the way it is.
The majority of people are always poor and far from having any influence in society. Those are the ones that are being toyed with as with, for instance, the poor woman in this film. All she is left with is doing a good job as employee. She is fragile and has very little self-esteem and would it become common knowledge that she cannot even read, she would rather kill herself than letting this happen. It is made clear in the film that it wasn't inability, like dyslexia, that made her an illiterate, so the only other choice we have is extreme poverty or abuse in childhood as an explanation.
Who has most guilt in a war and/or a holocaust? The profiteer, who makes money on it or the poor person who is left with the dirty work? Knowing how dementia has grown strong in society in later years, I allow myself to state the obvious (which this film doesn't, by the way, probably because the makers think that people are less dumb than I think that they are): You have as much guilt for anything as you have influence to change that thing. The extremely poor have practically no guilt and the extremely rich have practically all guilt. When those with all the guilt sit to judge over those with no guilt - then shame has over-crossed every conceivable boundary.
In the end, the guilt-ridden story-teller visits a rich Jewess in the USA. She was not a direct victim but bears a cross for all family-members that were killed in the holocaust. She doesn't see that she is a profiteer of the events, belonging to a minority which, after the war, had no difficulty whatsoever to reach power-positions in society - the persecution was gone and replaced by its opposite and you can easily claim that after the war, being Jewish was the same as belonging to an augmented masonry.
This film is a story of rich and poor and how, once again, the poor are pointed out as the bad guys and the rich as the innocent. The film does take a stand for the poor but that stand you will have to look for a little. That's one topic. The other topic is the crushed self-esteem of the poor. So many of them are left with so little of it, that they cling on to it even when facing death. This is another great topic, totally deserving a film of its own.