Mendel . Newcity Chicago . 06-29-98

Mendel

DIRECTED BY: Alexander Røsler

REVIEWED: 06-29-98

"Mendel" is an unsettling comedy, but also an unlikely charmer from director Alexander Rosler, a documentarian and children's-film maker who was born in Dachau and emigrated as a child with his family to Norway in the 1950s. Displaced to the cold Christian Scandinavian climes, nine-year-old Mendel (the intense and combative Thomas Jorgen Sorensen) and his Jewish family are faced with a world and a cast of characters who find them just as strange as they find their new surroundings. As his parents deny him stories of World War II, Mendel has to invent his own twisted mythology to explain his history, his family's history, why his concentration-camp survivor parents wake up screaming at night. Then there are the figures of Jesus Christ and Santa Claus, as mysterious and disturbing to Mendel as Hitler himself. When Mendel learns what secrets his family has withheld, Rosler's story shifts to another plane, and the story is never less than compelling, rich with the anecdotal specificity of experience. 95m.

--Ray Pride

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