Film review: The last Vermeer

 There is a part of Dalton Trumbo's acceptance speech (when he was awarded the Laurel Award by the Writer's Guild of America) that I thought about after I watched this film. Mr Trumbo, like others in America, was for a time blacklisted by the House on un-American activities committee and by the major producers of the period who went along with the government, the committee's agenda. 

"The blacklist was a time of evil and that no one on either side, who survived it, came through untouched by evil. Caught in a situation that had passed beyond the control of mere individuals, each person reacted as his nature, his needs, his convictions and his particular circumstances compelled him to. There was bad faith and good. Honesty and dishonesty. Courage and cowardice. Selflessness and opportunism. Wisdom and stupidity. Good and bad on both sides. And almost every individual involved, no matter where he stood, combined some or all of these antithetical qualities, in his own person, in his own acts."

This quote can also adequately describe people during the second world war. Regardless of what "front" someone might have been on, regardless of whether you were wearing an uniform, it can be safely said that civilians had to find a way to survive those years of horror and when the war was over, try to forget.

This film is based on a true story and it is about an enigmatic character and the man who was investigating him. Han Van Meegeren and Joseph Piller, respectively. Guy Pearce portrays the former and Claes Bang portrays the latter. Both performances are a masterstroke - pardon the art pun.

The former is accused of selling art to the Nazis but with most war time experiences, there is more to it than that. The war itself may be over, but those attempting to rebuild and punish those responsible are determined to find everyone who collaborated with the Nazi regime, are just as ruthless and the anger is real by those who lived in an occupied country and now see those convicted as collaborators. And that too, has an effect.  

The film opens with one such collaborator being killed by firing squad. It is showed bluntly and it is clear that those in the crowd show practically no sympathy to the condemned man. This film is very clever in the way the past is shown in flashbacks and the story itself is a fascinating one. 

And it keeps you thinking about how history repeats when you don't learn from it. We see much of the same fear and hate spread today, fear of refugees, of those who are different, who believe differently, love differently. I was reassured today, by the fact the cinema I saw this film in was almost full of people watching carefully. And that this film, among others, are still being made. Because people forget, or they do not even know of these horrors until too late and they are part of that history again.