Truce, The Review

In the opening scenes of The Truce, World War Two has ended: the Red Army arrives at the gates of Auschwitz, and the survivors are freed, free to go home; but the journey home wasn`t so simple. The protagonist of The Truce, played by John Turturro, takes months to travel from Auschwitz to his home in Turin. He journeys through Poland, east into the Soviet Union, then back to Italy via Romania, Hungary and Austria. Along the way he encounters many other survivors of the war, among them a larger than life Greek, played by Rade Serbedzija... The Truce, the book by the Italian Holocaust survivor Primo Levi, vividly described Levi`s experiences in the aftermath of World War Two, but these experiences are not so easily transferred to film. Master director Francesco Rosi has laboured mightily to visualise Levi`s odyssey, overcoming great obstacles, like the death of his cinematographer Pasqualino De Santis during the difficult Russian shoot (the film`s editor, veteran Ruggero Mastroianni, also died during production). Rosi`s vision is a powerful one, but the casting of John Turturro seems too much of a compromise - the actor, who lost weight to play the role, does a quite remarkable job, but he doesn`t seem right, nor does the english dialogue. It`s not really enough to visualise Levi`s wanderings through the shattered wasteland of eastern Europe; and Rosi doesn`t quite manage the enormously difficult task of getting inside his central character, allowing us to experience Levi`s thoughts and feelings.