Love Gets a Room

January 1942, Warsaw. The ghetto has been sealed for more than a year; inside there is hunger, sickness and death every day. That night a musical comedy is being staged in a theatre. The hall is full; the people of the ghetto have come for a few hours. Behind the curtain something else is happening: the actress Stefcia is offered a way out of the ghetto and has the minutes between scenes to decide. The man she loves is waiting outside; the man she acts with is inside. Rodrigo Cortés directs. Clara Rugaard plays Stefcia, with Ferdia Walsh-Peelo in the cast. The formal decision is this: the narrative takes place entirely inside the theatre building and nearly in real time. The play on stage and the life in the wings run at once, and the camera moves between them. That theatres and cabarets operated in the Warsaw ghetto is a historical fact; performance continued amid hunger and death, and it stands in the record as one of the strangest details of the period. The narrative uses no images of camps; the terror is outside and inside there are only people's decisions. The comedy on stage is deliberately light and loud, and that contrast is the film's main instrument. Its limits are the performances and the language; the cast plays in English, which puts a distance between the film and its historical ground. Who it is for: viewers who like films set in one location and narratives of the Second World War. Who it is not for: the theatre sections interrupt, the emotional register rises, and the historical frame stays in the background.