A Real Pain, Jesse Eisenberg’s film about two cousins on a heritage tour of Holocaust-related sites in Poland, has been largely embraced by Polish audiences, who appreciated its understated humour and conspicuous good intentions. Within a month of its release, the film had grossed more than $1m at the Polish box office – no small feat for an indie production in Poland. “There was a collective sigh of relief,” says Vogue Poland film critic Anna Tatarska, “that here was a Hollywood Holocaust narrative that didn’t cast Poles as historical villains.”
Poland’s fraught relationship with Holocaust narratives has made films touching on it into political battlegrounds for at least a decade. Since the nationalist backlash against films such as Aftermath (Pokłosie) in 2012, and Ida a year later – each of which confronted Polish complicity in wartime Jewish persecution – cinema has become a flashpoint in Poland’s ongoing struggle with historical memory. Against this backdrop, A Real Pain occupies an unusually diplomatic position, and this political neutrality helped Eisenberg’s film achieve what others couldn’t: acceptance not only from Polish audiences but also officialdom.
