My Best Enemy

In 1943 an SS plane comes down over Poland. Two people get out of the wreck alive: a concentration camp prisoner and an SS officer. The two of them know each other. Before the war they were close friends in Vienna; one of them came from a family of art dealers and the other more or less grew up in that house. Between them there is also a Michelangelo drawing, and that drawing has shaped both their lives. Wolfgang Murnberger's Austrian film tries to tell the Holocaust in the shape of a black comedy: identities are swapped, uniforms change hands. The approach is open to argument and the film knows it; while it builds absurd situations, it does not make the killing lighter, it keeps it in the background. Moritz Bleibtreu plays the Jewish friend and Georg Friedrich the SS officer. The material is heavy and the tone is deliberately light.