MOVIE REVIEWS : ‘RESISTANCE’: TRIANGLE IN NAZI SHADOW

Holland’s Gerard Thoolen is one of those rare actors who can light up the screen and steal your heart the instant he steps in front of a camera.

In the fine, thoughtful period piece, “Private Resistance” (at the Fox International), Thoolen plays Otto Schneeweiss, proud proprietor of an Amsterdam ice cream parlor, only a tiny corner neighborhood establishment yet boasting real crystal chandeliers.

Bald, fleshy, beautifully dressed with a big red carnation in his lapel, Otto fusses over his customers and his wares as if his place were the Ritz. Ebullient and kind, he is one of the true lovers of life and all the good things it has to offer. Mahler’s Fourth Symphony transports him--and so does Trudi (Renee Soutendijk), the beautiful young blond who works in a nearby laundry.

If Otto’s gestures and expansiveness seem to belong to a larger, more sophisticated arena, it’s understandable--until recently he had been the proprietor of the snazziest ice cream shop on Berlin’s glittery Kurfurstendamm. But Otto is Jewish, and he had been forced to flee to the Netherlands. It’s now February, 1941, the month in which the forces of the German Occupation, which had been keeping a low profile for a year, step up their persecution of Holland’s Jews.

And it is just now that Gustav (Bruno Ganz), Otto’s good friend, a geologist and now a reluctant German officer, arrives from Berlin. Gradually, a complex, shifting eternal triangle develops among Otto, Trudi and Gustav, who is understandably as attracted to Trudi as Otto is. For all the simmering emotional conflict involving the three friends, the larger concern of both Trudi and Gustav is how to convince Otto of the escalating danger encircling him.

In this handsome, richly evocative Roeland Kerbosch production, writer-director Dimitri Frenkel Frank has deftly told a fictional tale set against true incidents. The character of each of his three central figures becomes sharply defined by darkening events. Frank manages to make exceedingly familiar material fresh, not only by distinctive characterization and a sure grasp of the psychology of his people and their relationships, but also by suggesting, finally, that no one really knows how anyone will behave under duress until the moment of truth arrives.

As for those of Holland’s Jews who resist believing the worst, Frank is as compassionate as he is critical, and as “Private Resistance” (Time rated Mature for adult themes) ends, it reminds us that despite Holland’s own despicable Nazi followers, the Dutch on the whole were decent and brave in desperate times.

The broodingly effective Ganz, one of the leading stars of the new German cinema, and Soutendijk, familiar to foreign audiences from her indelible presence in such films as “Spetters” and “The Fourth Man,” graciously leave the center ring to Thoolen, a distinguished veteran of the Dutch stage and screen and previously unknown in America. What wonderfully mixed emotions his irrepressible Otto elicits when, determinedly ignoring a bloody Nazi riot outside his shop, he chastises his assistant, saying, “There’s too much sweet in this lemon ice! How many times do I have to tell you?” By the time we take leave of Otto, we realize that Thoolen has moved us in much the same way Simone Signoret did with her equally gallant Madame Rosa.