The Boy in the Striped Pajamas (2008)

It seems as though the film industry is always trying to find new ways to tell us the holocaust story. The tragedy of this is that the consistent repetition of such movies could threaten to numb viewers to the true horrors of one of humanities worst moments. Indeed the Jew in the concentration camp now borders on being a trit movie convention, like the car chase. This is where The Boy in the Striped Pajamas comes in, a new take on the holocaust story that actually is a new take, because it reintroduces us to the horror of that genocide from a fresh perspective, that of a child. We’ve never truly seen the holocaust on screen from a child’s perspective, granted Roberto Benigni’s Life is Beautiful (the last film before this that I can think of to really have a fresh take on the holocaust) is largely about a fathers efforts to shield his son from such horrors, but Stripped Pajamas is on the whole from the actual point of view of the child, and this child’s not even Jewish. Bruno (Asa Butterfield in a performance that seems ever more remarkable the more I think on it) is the eight year old son of the new commandant at a German concentration camp. Bored and lonely Bruno strikes up a friendship with the seemingly titular ‘boy in the stripped pajamas’ whom he meets, and can only communicate with, through the electric fence of the said concentration camp. Bruno doesn’t understand what’s going on, he thinks at first the people in the camp to be a group of ‘strange farmers’, and while his conceptions of what goes on beyond that fence do change over time, he can never really figure it out as no one, not even the boy, can give him a straight answer.

Watching Bruno trying to figure things out, trying to reconcile the bits and pieces of seemingly contradictory information he gets, along with his own non-judgmental child’s perspective on things, offers the beginnings of the films pathos. We can see events through Bruno’s eyes, he is an excellent everyman, an innocent we can get behind. Yet we the audience are aware of the larger picture where he is not, we can see the true cause of the tension in his parents relationship, and we can see how his older sisters pubescent crush on a Nazi officer makes her so pliably receptive to this new world view proffered around her. As the film nears its climax, and we can see what’s coming, the movie offers us a new way of experiencing the Nazi’s horror, one that seemingly brings things closer to us, but if we are perceptive also chastises us; chastises us for daring to think that this tragedy, as tragic as it is, is any worse from the holocaust we’ve seen on film so many times before, just because it comes to us from a perspective that seems entirely new. 5 out of 5.