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Solomon Perel grew up in Germany as the fourth child in a Jewish family. The first moments of "Europa Europa," Agnieszka Holland's gruesomely comic movie set between 1938 and '45 and based on Perel's autobiography, recount the boy's circumcision-an event he claims to remember. (It opens today at the Music Hall.)
Certainly as his story develops, his circumcision becomes the one defining, unalterable event in his life. No matter how hard he tries to re-arrange his identity to save himself from the Nazis, the brute physical fact of that circumcision keeps tripping him up, taunting his efforts at impersonation.
It's an incredible story, as only true stories can be. Separated from his family and on the run from the Nazis, Solly, through a chain of remarkable happenstance, becomes first a model Soviet student in an orphanage devoted to Stalinist indoctrination and then a model Hitler Youth. For nearly seven years Solly (Marco Hofschneider) lives in a state of constant alert. He is like an actor who is forever primed for performance; his survival instincts are so heightened that he finds himself merging with the characters he's playing. Solly's double life is a nightmarish joke: In one of the film's...