Woman in Gold

Author NotesWoman in Gold (2015), directed by Simon Curtis, represents the protracted legal fight over the painting Mona Lisa of Austria, Klimt's oil, gold and silver portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer, which was renamed and appropriated by the Nazis shortly after the Anschluss in 1938. This battle, which ended up requiring adjudication by the United States Supreme Court and Austrian arbitration, becomes a cinematic occasion for portraying the next stage of Holocaust memory for Jews and non-Jews alike.Maria Altmann, expertly played by Helen Mirren, is the aging niece of Adele Block-Bauer who barely escaped Nazi-occupied Vienna. After burying her sister, she enlists Randy Schoenberg (Ryan Reynolds), a young, inexperienced lawyer, to help her repossess the masterpiece regarded as a national treasure by the Austrian art world and government. To her, however, the painting represents a beloved aunt and a reminder of a family and world extinguished by the Shoah.The past and present intermingle throughout the film. As Maria makes her first trip back to Vienna more than half a century after fleeing for her life, she- and we as viewers-flash back to her wedding, an historic event that straddled the border between pre- and post-Anschluss for the Viennese Jewish community. Here her uncle gifts her with the necklace that Adele wore while posing for Klimt's painting, praising his niece for being "headstrong and inquiring" and declaring that within her lies "something of Adele's spirit." Thus Maria is firmly established as the guardian for the legacy and memory of Adele, who was herself childless. Also at the wedding, we watch Maria's uncle and father argue about whether to stay or go, a debate at its heart about whether Austrian Jews were truly Austrians and would be able to count on the support of their fellow and sister citizens. The wedding dance, which begins with elegant, celebratory orderliness and speeds up into chaotic mania is a stunning scene that symbolizes the historic answer to this question about belonging, and who would ultimately collaborate with whom.Although the film restrains its use of the most violent Holocaust imagery and narratives (for example, the film does not chronicle or even suggest that Maria's husband, Fritz, spent time in Dachau), it does recreate footage of Austrian crowds cheering the arrival of the Nazis as well as the support received for forcing Jews to paint the word "Jud" on their own establishments. The strategy of religious humiliation is also shown on-screen as Nazi officers assemble religious Jewish men and cut off their payesses (sidelocks). In a further nod to the notion of living history essential to this film, one of the actors in this scene is the son of a Viennese Jewish refugee. During the sequence in which Maria and Fritz are escaping Vienna, both a pharmacist and a well-dressed woman alert the Nazis to their whereabouts. However, they are aided not only by a family friend who drives them to the airport but also by a woman hanging laundry who, with a nod of her head, provides them with an escape route and then shrewdly points their pursuers in the opposite direction. Although the national narrative is clearly one of active collaboration, Curtis and screenwriter Alexi Kaye Campbell are careful to represent resistors and those who would become known as Righteous Gentiles. …