Working with co-writers Laurence Coriat and Paul Viragh, Michael Winterbottom hits a clear, confident stride with a robustly well made, if emotionally flavourless historical drama set during the British mandate in what was then Palestine. It is a film that speaks in a complex way to the current Gaza debate, contending that Zionism has anti-colonialism and anti-imperialism in its 20th-century manifestation: a rage against the British masters. But the implication is that it learned habits of ruthlessness from these very people.
The film is based on the true story of Shoshana Borochov, a socialist Zionist writer who came with her Ukrainian family to Tel Aviv as a child in the 1920s and grew up to have a long-term romantic relationship with a British police officer called Thomas Wilkin, who was assassinated by the militant group Lehi, otherwise known as the Stern Gang, in 1944. Douglas Booth plays Wilkin, and Shoshana is played by the very stylish Russian actor Irina Starshenbaum (known for Kirill Serebrennikov’s 1980s-set rock romance Leto).
