Product: Nowhere in Africa (2003)
Rating: 5.0
Even Better the Day After
Last night leaving the theater I had Nowhere in Africa, the deserving winner of Best Foreign Film in this year's Oscars, at four stars. This drizzly Washington morning it is now at five for it sits on our minds over breakfast coffee as richly as when we had just walked out of the theater.A young Jewish lawyer in Germany as the Nazis consolidate their evil escapes to Kenya. As he lies recovering from malaria, nursed back to health by his African cook, his wife receives the delayed letter telling her that the Jewish society of Kenya has agreed to pay their passage to reunite the family. Parents and sisters are left behind to a certain fate; life on an African farm proves hardscrabble at best; the daughter, scarcely five on arrival and the voice-over narrator looking back on the years, finds a true home. The couple struggle in their marriage as much as in their efforts to survive. That they do eventually dwell successfully on the land is, naturally, almost entirely due to the friendship and loyal labor of the rural Africans they employ. The war ends; the Nazis are put in the dock; with each individual much changed from when he or she first arrived, does the family stay or return to post-war Germany? All this happens under the towering African skies and in the vast bush beauty of rural Kenya.Nowhere in Africa runs well over two hours. It might have benefitted from losing ten minutes of its running time. Beyond that, there is nothing here to dispute -- acting is sensitive and nuanced, character development and change is thoroughly convincing, secondary characters add much to the main narrative; there are even fine bits of humor -- the cook is a cook, period, but what fun for the villagers when he does one bit of woman's work at the water hole.Nowhere in Africa, tragic in its long-distance depiction of the Holocaust, is also never less than a love story of people and place and memory. It is superb.