Now is as good a time as any to better understand Israel, and Michael Winterbottom may be the film-maker best placed to aid us in this understanding. His intelligent and compelling new romantic thriller is set in the late 1930s and early 1940s, among the bright young things of Mandatory Palestine, and like several of his previous films it inventively blends fact and fiction to tell a trueish story about daily life in a war zone.
Shoshana Borochov (a charismatic Irina Starshenbaum) is the real-life figure cutting a dash through Tel Aviv high society in this exciting time of Jewish self-determination and utopian dreaming. She spends her days passionately debating politics at dockside cafes or dodging the bombs and bullets of the Zionist militant group Irgun. Her nights are reserved for conducting a dangerous love affair with a British intelligence officer, Tom Wilkin (Douglas Booth).
In the current media-political climate, the film’s total absence of Palestinian voices is glaring, but that’s no fault of Winterbottom’s storytelling. Shoshana clearly defines its own purview, giving valuable insight into the variance of opinion within the era’s Zionist movement, while also highlighting the central role of a third player in this fraught and bloody history: British colonialism.
