Films on Sunday: Transatlantic & I’m your Man
Incredible WWII story of evacuation of Europe’s writers/artists from Vichy France prior to US joining the war; a handsome robot is assigned to be a real partner to a real person.
Transatlantic (Netflix)
Mary Jayne Gold refuses to comply with her father’s demand that she take the next plane home to Chicago. She’s in the ancient port city of Marseille which in 1940 is under German jurisdiction but not yet fully Nazi-occupied, and the local French police are already obeying German orders that the city purge itself of ‘undesirables’.
A private American relief group, the Emergency Rescue Committee, led by Harvard graduate and journalist Varian Fry (Cory Michael Smith), manages a ‘flight portfolio,’ a list of the cream of German intellectual society, to aid their escape; he and Mary Jayne (Gillian Jacobs) have been devising exit routes for writers, scholars, artists, including Marc Chagall, Max Ernst, Marcel Duchamp, Andre Breton, Hannah Arendt, Walter Mehring, the Mahlers, an occasional revolutionary and many others.
Passenger ships are no longer allowed to dock in Marseille (blocking escape from the south of France), but there are other routes to be connived such as commercial boats or by road and on foot over the Pyrenees to Lisbon, and Mary Jayne has a Mercedes. Her father has stopped disbursements from her trust fund because she won’t come home, but she has her jewels, considerable moxy/feminine wiles, and the horror of returning to a life playing bridge at the club. Rather she has chosen to aid Varian’s ERC missions along with a tight group of others, including Albert Hirschmann (Lucas Englander). Albert would later become a well-known economist but is now a stateless refugee having been on the run from the Nazis since 1933; here, he’s a quick-thinking man of action. (Being Jewish never really meant anything to me; now it’s the most important thing about me.)
West African Paul Kandjo (Ralph Amoussou) and his brother, Jacques, work the desk at the Hotel Splendide where the staff of the ERC are staying. The Kandjo brothers intend to build armed resistance to colonialism and the Nazis which have stripped them of their identity.
Graham Patterson (Corey Stoll), US Consul in Marseille, represents the anti-semitic, isolationist public opinion prior to Pearl Harbor that has prevented Franklin Roosevelt from open involvement in hostilities. The United States has taken a neutral position on this war, Mr. Fry; you and I are in wartime France at the pleasure of the French authorities…..
Patterson is worse than indifferent to the struggles of the ERC to assist refugee escape. Fascism is the new world order, he asserts. At least the Germans believe in free enterprise… business is business….. He’s busy exploring deals to sell American technology to Hitler, and he passes every information scrap about Fry’s ERC efforts to French Chief of Police Frot (Gregory Mantel). That leads to Frot-ordered raids, arrests, and sweeps of emigres living at the hotel and squatting on nearby beaches, to be imprisoned locally and then sent on to German camps. The ERC rescuers play a cat and mouse game with Frot and Consul Patterson for seven episodes that is the juice of this series.
Patterson’s vice-consul, Hiram Bingham (Luke Thompson, aka Benedict Bridgerton) is the lone officer in the consular office willing to help Fry, completing paperwork behind Patterson’s back using the consulate visa stamp. (Bingham saved Jews throughout the war and has since been honored by Israel.)
Each of the series chapters involves a different cloak and dagger rescue mission with interesting characters playing the rescuees. Behind the action, Fry is struggling to arrange the details; Mary Jayne, Albert, the Kanjos, and a few others aid the escapes.
Britain, already suffering mightily from German bombing and warfare, has a female agent in the area, Margaux, recruiting help in carrying out its missions. Mary Jayne, suddenly without funds, is ripe for the plucking although the work is illegal, violating US neutrality. Margaux has British resistance fighters in the local prison she wants broken out. This enterprise is the subject of Chapters 4-5.
Debra Winger, (Unorthodox) showrunner and a writer of Transatlantic, makes no claim that all is entirely factual. Rather, the series is described as fiction inspired by real people and events. It is infused with clever black and white sequences, laugh-out-loud satire, and romance, along with the reckless execution of its ‘flight portfolio’ missions. Still, Europe’s brain trust, among them some eccentric and idiosyncratic types, made their exit with the help of Varian Fry’s ERC.
Mary Jayne and Albert fall in love. Varian* finds a long lost former lover, (Amit Rahav, Unorthodox; We Were the Lucky Ones) in possession of a 26 bedroom villa, to which Varian’s assorted refugees and such luminaries as Peggy Guggenheim (Jodhi May) are conveyed during the police raid on the Splendide. These bittersweet romances wind up and down behind the rescues and the soirees held at Villa Air-bel, such as a bizarre birthday party for surrealist artist Max Ernst (Alexander Fehling; Inglorious Basterds, Homeland). But why not? Should not the creme of society be living their lives during these months of waiting and waiting?
The Chagall’s have a home nearby they are unwilling to leave. They are pudgy yentas, reluctantly facing facts, but refusing to depart without his life’s work — his store of paintings.
As 1941 matures, Nazis are now roaming the streets and ERC staff are in mortal danger. In October (shortly before Pearl Harbor), Varian ‘lifts’ an embassy car leaving his lover and Villa Air-bel behind. The Chagalls and a substantial pile of rolled up canvases are in the car, and they have embassy plates that will get them through checkpoints on the road to Lisbon. Mary Jayne departs for Chicago, the first hop in a tiny plane. Patterson is salivating over an offer from an American tech company doing business with the Germans. Life in Marseille now growing more menacing, we close the book on a partly true, smile-a-frame sojourn in Vichy France in which 2000+ Jewish and other refugees have been assisted to safety.
*Both Amit Rahav and Cory Michael Smith are openly gay actors. Although some reports insist that Varian Fry was straight, his son has confirmed his being gay. Fry died young at 59, having lived a pretense most of his life. Albert Hirschmann, economist, held positions at Yale and Harvard, and was on the faculty of Princeton for decades prior to his death at 97 in 2012. Mary Jayne divided her post-war years between NYC and a villa on the French Riviera. She never married. The ERC merged with the International Rescue Committee (rescue.org), headed by David Milleband with branches in 50 countries. https://www.timesofisrael.com/the-jewish-history-behind-the-wwii-rescue-that-inspired-netflixs-
I’m You Man (Hulu)
Dan Stevens (Downton Abbey, Cuckoo) is our man, a handsome fellow who aims to understand and please a particular woman for whom he was configured — as companion, lover, housemate. He is a robot with big blue eyes manufactured in cosmopolitan Berlin and being beta tested by Dr. Alma Felser (Maren Eggert*), an anthropologist, team leader, teacher studying the ancient use of poetry in writing. She’s been asked to test ‘Tom’ because she isn’t married or in a relationship (although her ex is not quite out of the picture). But she’s a querulous participant, finding no logic in the idea that a machine might be able to replace a human being as a real partner.
Alma and Tom are brought together at a dinner/dance club where the action is in full swing. Their host is a social worker/coach for the length of the test period (the award-winning Sandra Huller), Tom, having been programmed to please, advances through corny tropes, telling Alma she is very beautiful; her eyes like two human lakes he could sink into. He sweeps her onto the dance floor with pretentious rumba moves. Suddenly he begins to repeat his words, in an obvious malfunction, and is carried off the floor. The coach reappears, full of apology, how rare an occurrence, how difficult to program flirting, etc., but confirming Alma’s (and our own) suspicion that this is a useless exercise, no substitute for real companionship.
Alma complains to her boss who inveigled her into the situation. He tells her he’s on the ethics committee deciding whether these robots will be allowed to marry, work, have human rights. He urges her to stick with it for the three weeks — he needs her input.
But Tom is programmed to learn from her responses and little by little he progresses in ingratiating himself. Officially, Alma is not pleased: I can’t do this, she says. I strongly advise against authorizing humanoids as life partners, she writes in her evaluation of her experience with Tom.
Are humans meant to have all their needs met at the push of a button? [Will we] create a society of addicts gorged and weary from having their needs permanently met?…..
However, Alma appears to be changing her mind even as she is constructing her objection. Tom has been programmed to learn and push back to her moods; he progresses from a diet of flattery to nuanced responses, including making an important discovery about her work that completely disorients and upsets her. He has begun to acquire meaning in her daily life, much more so than as a subject to evaluate.
And her behavior contradicts her written evaluation. We are left not with her/our presupposed academic certainty but with the question of whether ‘Tom’, a machine, can actually contribute emotional content to the life of a human. It ends rather sweetly, not with a yes or a no, but with a subject still being discovered, and a film that both entertains and raises questions to take to bed pondering seriously about…..
*Eggert won a best acting award at the Berlin Film Festival for her role as Alma. Dan Stevens’ work here satisfies the question about why he left Downton: his thirst for very original characters to inhabit.