Cinema - Everything is Illuminated

Jonathon Saffron Foer borrowed the title of his acclaimed novel from a phrase in Milan Kundera's ‘The Unbearable Lightness of Being’: 'In the sunset of dissolution, everything is illuminated by the aura of nostalgia, even the guillotine.' First time director/ writer Liev Schreiber has in turn borrowed Foer's book for adaptation in his 2005 film of the same name. Yet, although Foer's work shot the 26-year-old writer to literary prominence and earned him accolades from the likes of John Updike, Joyce Carol Oates and Salmon Rushdie, the response to Shreiber's offering has been rather more muted.

Telling the story of a young New York Jew, (named after the book's author and played by a buttoned-up Elijah Wood), an obsessive collector of historical artefacts, the film focuses in on the central quest for Augustine - a woman who saved Jonathon's grandfather's life during the Nazi liquidation of the small Ukranian town of Trachimbrod. The Gypsy-descended punk rocker, Eugene Hutz plays opposite Wood as Alex, an American-obsessed Ukrainian, whose implausible 'premium' English seems 'dubbed' from a Google translation engine. Whilst the novel was praised for the way in which it switched between two story arcs which juxtaposed the straightforward quest with a highly literary novel-in-progress about the citizens of Trachimbrod, the film is regarded as suffering from a narrower focus. Nevertheless, it contains some breathtaking visual sequences, such as an otherworldly camera shot of a path leading to a solitary cottage amidst a field of blossoming sunflowers. ER