The prologue of the movie shows a time of peace and freedom. The children are shown playing in a wide, open field and a woman is shown smiling, resting by a river. The director made a good choice on opening the movie in this way for this opening scene does not only offer a glimpse of what happened to Sol but it is also the opposite of the life he lives after that. In other words, “before Europe became a graveyard”, his family enjoyed freedom; they were not restricted in their movements and were capable of enjoying what life offers them.
Then the director fast forwards the audience to the movie’s present day, a place in which the colors of the setting are not as bright as those of the opening scene. It is there that the audience is reassured that the opening scene was a memory. (Another way the director made it obvious that the joyous days that Sol had were a memory were through the slower than normal movements of the children, and the fact that there was no sound.) This is the first hint that the director gives to the audience that Sol is suffering from PTSD. When I was first looking at the scene where he wakes up, I did not like the location of the shot. Particularly I did not understand why we suddenly are forced onto knowing whom his sister-in-law is when she does not appear anymore. I suppose that this scene gives the audience a peek into his personality, however, I believe he could have awaken in his apartment and the audience would piece together his personality through his interactions with others.
The main reason I did not like that scene was because it felt out of place. Throughout the rest of the movie, Sol is in small, cluttered places; these places do not look similar to that in which his sister-in-law lives. It would have been more striking if the audience saw the sharp contrast between his old, happy life with his wife and children and the life he lives in the present. Either way, overall the director does a good job exploiting Sol’s personality and experiences. Through out most of the movie, Sol is viewed to be behind a set of bars (which can represent prison bars), and even when the bars are not viewed physically, their shadow is cast onto his face. This served as a reminder to the audience of how trapped he is. The people he encounters are always shown leaving the pawnshop while he, unknowingly, is trapped there. This is an indirect way of showing that Sol is trapped yet again. It does not become obvious until he confronts his boss about his whorehouses. It is at that instant that he realizes that he is trapped like a mouse (just like he was in the concentration camps). His African-American boss parallels the SS soldiers, the bars he puts himself in parallel the barbed wires of the concentration camp.
Sol remains oblivious of the fact that he trapped himself for about half the movie for he believes that everyone else is a scum. He believes in only money; he doesn’t believe in God, in science, or in art. (This is to be expected; for many Holocaust survivors lost their belief in their religion after what they saw and what they went through during the time in a concentration camp.) He does not talk to others for more than what is needed, nor does he listen to them when they try to converse with them. He forced himself to be detached from human emotion, making him part of the living dead. This is clearly shown when the woman’s father died and he was unable to respond to that. What he told her was “what you want me to leave the store and cry with you?” In addition, during every interaction between him and his customers there is a shot in which on the left hand side of the frame the costumer (who can represent the outside world) is shown and on the right hand side of the frame Sol (surrounded by objects and tickets) is shown with the bars in the middle. These shots signify in showing the difference between his character and theirs. Also, during all those interactions, Sol mostly focuses on the tickets and scarcely examines the objects. He does not make much eye contact with them.
Another thing I did not like about the movie was the speed in which the flashbacks were introduced. They were shown for a split second and if the audience blinked, they would miss it. However, this is understandable for that is how flashbacks occur. They just happen unexpectedly and anything closely resembling the memory will trigger it to occur. The reason that the flashbacks would flicker is because he was trying to fight them. What I did like in this movie were the close-ups of his expressions when he was undergoing one of these flashbacks. They showed how underneath this stoic mask lies a man afraid of his past, a man who is incapable of moving on. My favorite shot of this movie was a shot during the time he starts telling the woman who works with the youth organization of his past. It was a side profile of him and in the background; a factory was visible with black smoke rising out of it. I found that shot the shot that clearly shows what happened to Sol, and it represents that no matter where he goes he cannot escape his past.
