‘Primo Levi's Journey'
Too much journey, too little Levi
Film director Davide Ferrario lives in Primo Levi's hometown of Turin, but his documentary production is misnamed. Primo Levi's Journey is only partially about the world-renowned Italian-Jewish writer and Auschwitz survivor who is thought to have taken his own life in 1987. And it is not really about Levi's journey, but about geography; it tracks his circuitous route from Poland back home to Turin after being liberated by the Soviet Army in 1945.
For no discernible reason except possibly the chaos of the immediate aftermath of the war, Levi and 800 of his fellow Italian ex-prisoners are transported by train hundreds of miles north and east, rather than directly repatriated west and south to Italy. Their return trip lasts eight months.
Ferrario's conceit is to retrace their path through much of Eastern Europe 60 years later, matching his film crew's journey in 2005 with geographically appropriate selections from Levi's 1963 memoir, The Truce (published in the United States as 
The Reawakening), read by the distinguished American actor Chris Cooper. We occasionally view the author on stock film footage — this intense, physically slight individual, visiting his former place of imprisonment at Auschwitz or walking alone, pensive, often smoking in unidentified places.
We ache for more of these glimpses of Primo Levi and to hear his soulful words recited by Cooper. Instead, we are distracted — sometimes engagingly, sometimes tediously — by stories and images from contemporary Eastern Europe or even from 20 or 30 years before. We see too many open-air markets, too many glum peasant faces, too many fields and country train stations.
In the process, the viewer learns more about the decade and a half since the end of communist rule and the fall of the Soviet Union than about Primo Levi. The author is very much present at the start, where he himself began this journey, in Auschwitz. We see his return in the 1980s.
We lose him as Ferrario's rendition of Levi's journey makes its first stop at Nowa Huta, Poland, the model communist city of 100,000 celebrated in outtakes from a period propaganda film about its construction. In the first of the series of episodes that take us away from Levi, the noted filmmaker Andrzej Wajda (who artfully dissected that era with his Man of Marble in 1976) comments on the nature of this now largely vacant and forlorn place, amid its abandoned giant factories.
The film proceeds to Lviv, Ukraine, the former Polish city of Lwow, where it parachutes viewers into the violent death in 2000 of Igor Bilozir. The Ukranian nationalist singer was alleged to have been murdered by Russian speakers in a brawl over his singing a Ukrainian song at a coffee house. We get only the Ukrainian nationalist side of the story in this now fervently Ukrainian city.
We move on to the one ex-Soviet republic, Belarus (what used to be known in the West as "White Russia"), where the Soviet system basically endures. We view a massive and amazingly detailed tableau of a World War II battle scene and meet an elderly Soviet war widow whose husband was killed about two weeks before Germany surrendered. In the midst of her drab, spartan rural surroundings, she praises the president/dictator of Belarus for a life in which all her needs are met. In another scene, the crew's filming at an immense war memorial is interrupted by the "ideological councilor" who brings them in for an interrogation that lasts an hour but does not appear to have been very arduous. They are then given a laughingly superficial orientation to the kolkhoz [collective farm] system, a remnant of Soviet times.
It's not far from there to Chernobyl, the Ukrainian border town made infamous by the nuclear disaster there in 1986. Nearby is Prypiat — once home to over 50,000 who were forcibly evacuated — and a ghost town ever since the accident. A former resident tells viewers of the evacuation and recounts how his son was fortunate to be adopted by a prosperous family in Milan. He hasn't seen him since and doesn't even have enough money to visit.
We follow the trail of blight and decline through the republic of Moldova and travel briefly with a busload of immigrants heading through Rumania to a hoped-for new life in Italy. A tearful Moldovan nurse sees no future for her daughter without leaving home.
The film's mood turns more upbeat in Rumania, mixing scenes of horse-drawn carts and peasants with those showcasing a revival of industry, in particular at a factory that is owned and operated by Italians. The music becomes stirring as we enter Hungary and gaze at a "Cemetery of Communist Statues." Continuing on Levi's historic route, we visit briefly with German neo-Nazis in Munich before heading quickly through Austria to Italy and his home in Turin.
The filmmaker is expropriating the symbolism of Levi's journey to depict the desolation and dislocation of post-Soviet Eastern Europe as a parallel to the similar human and material detritus left in the wake of World War II. It is in Italy that the film refocuses upon Primo Levi. We meet Levi's close friend, the writer and fellow survivor Mario Rigoni Stern and return to contemplating Levi's life and death. But it is too little and too late to justify this work as truly being about Levi.
Primo Levi's Journey opened Aug. 17 in New York.
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