John Boyne's devastating novella is now an equally powerful film, writes Michael Dwyer
WE FIRST see eight-year-old Bruno as he runs through the streets with his friends, their arms outstretched as they pretend to be planes. The setting is Berlin in the 1940s, and the boys are oblivious to the significance of the Swastikas draped on buildings around them, or even more ominously, of people being rounded up and forced on to lorries.
Adult viewers need no more than the visual shorthand of those brief, juxtaposed scenes to realise where these people are being sent and what awaits them.
There is a lot that Bruno (played by Asa Butterfield) is too young to know or understand. There will be more after he and his family move to "the countryside", when his father (David Thewlis) is promoted to commandant and put in charge of a Nazi concentration camp.
When Bruno asks why their elderly servant wears pyjamas, his father replies, "These people, they're not really people at all". He adds, "We're working very hard to make this world a better place for you to grow up in." When Bruno later wonders about the fumes reeking from the distance, his father brusquely explains that rubbish is being burned there.
Lonely and bored without his friends, and curious to explore his new surroundings, Bruno ventures into the off-limits area behind the house and finds what he assumes to be a farm surrounded by a high barbed-wire fence.
He meets a boy around his own age, wearing striped pyjamas and sitting on the other side of the fence. This is Shmuel (Jack Scanlon), who is starving and fearful, but as innocent about his fate as Bruno is. Again the adult viewer will feel a sense of dread, and it lingers.
Films taking the Holocaust as a theme invariably tread a thin line between heartfelt outrage and insensitive exploitation. Cinema arguably has responded most effectively through documentaries form, principally in the powerful short Night and Fog, directed by Alain Resnais, and Claude Lanzmann's exemplary epic, Shoah.
Cynicism regarding narrative treatments of the subject has been fuelled by the propensity of the Oscars electorate to react to the importance of the theme by showering nominations and awards on movies as disparate as Schindler's List, Life Is Beautifuland The Pianist.
John Boyne's novella The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, described as "a fable" on its title page, and Mark Herman's essentially faithful screen version, are different from these other films. What makes them so is their shared perspective, viewing incomprehensible inhumanity through the uncomprehending minds of children.
Yes, Roberto Benigni placed a child inside a concentration camp in Life Is Beautiful, but that was played for laughs and pathos. And the riveting Hungarian film Fateless, based on an autobiographical novel by Imre Kersétz, was set primarily inside Buchenwald to illustrate the experiences of a 14-year-old male survivor.
In Herman's film, the horror of the so-called Final Solution is emphasised through truths about and insights into irrational prejudice and hatred, as gleaned from a child's point of view, and with an inevitable resonance for the modern world. Its accumulating power is rooted in the dramatic collision of childhood innocence and adult barbarity.
Nothing is overplayed in this unsentimental yet moving and deeply involving film, which features an ideally chosen cast and remains true to the numbing, devastating conclusion of Boyne's book.
