Live and Become Reviews (1)

New York, New York

Published Thursday, February 7, 2008

The title of Radu Mihaileanu's riveting film makes up the last words said to a 9-year-old Ethiopian boy by his Christian mother as she pushes him toward a clandestine caravan of Ethiopian Jews emigrating to Israel in the early 1980s. In a "Sophie's Choice" moment, the woman sends her son away, better to face an un-known future than an almost certain death. The story of this boy, who learns Hebrew and French, studies the Torah and assimilates into Israeli culture, provides an intimate look into a little-known chapter in the young state's history. In doing so, it examines the prejudices that exist there among black and white Jews. Played by three actors from ages 9 to 23, Schlomo is a bright, deeply conflicted youngster whose secret identity and guilt over a childhood incident in Ethiopia keep him at an emotional arm's length from his adoptive French-Israeli parents - and from a childhood sweetheart determined to look past his color and whatever else is driving him. Beautifully shot in France and Israel , "Live and Become" is both a love story and inspirational tale of an individual finding peace with himself in a hostile environment. By: Jack Mathews

Radu Mihaileanu chronicles the tumultuous journey to adulthood of a Christian Ethiopian child after his desperate mother sneaks him onto a 1985 airlift ferrying thousands of Falasha—Ethiopian Jews—to the relative safety and comfort of Israel. Stripped of his name, language, religion and family, nine-year-old “Shlomo” is adopted by a secular Jewish family and grows up searching for his place in a world where appearances are everything. Though most effective in the scenes depicting Shlomo’s displaced childhood, the film builds to an emotional conclusion whose uplift is tempered by subtle ambiguity. By: Maitland McDonagh

If Live and Become strikes you as a vague title, the young protagonist of Radu Mihaileanu’s film would despairingly agree. His mother’s parting words before she sends him off in the 1984 Israeli airlift of Ethiopian Jews contain none of the specific instructions the boy needs, considering the complexity of his situation. For one, he isn’t actually Jewish—he’s a Christian Ethiopian masquerading as a Jew so he can live in Israel with the French family that adopts him. The child is, as a fellow Ethiopian expatriate tells him, “condemned to live,” and this courageous film plumbs the complications of being so wonderfully and terribly lucky. Renamed Schlomo (and played, at various points, by Moshe Agazai, Mosche Abebe, and Sirak M. Sabahat), he lands in a supportive if imperfect family, including a sugary mench of a mother (Yaël Abecassis) who licks his pimply face in a show of camaraderie when his school proves reluctant to welcome him as a pupil—one instance of how xenophobia stifles his assimilation. Meanwhile, Schlomo yearns for his real mother, purveyor of that impossible advice. If the film sometimes feels overwrought—and at once too long and too short—its subtle motifs and loud silences, as well as the enormity of its subject matter, keep us absorbed until the devastating end. By: Abigail Deutsch