Sunday Review: The Debt2

Two movies, four sets of three actors

By Morris Dean

The IMDb's short description of The Debt (2010, directed by John Madden, starring in the role of Rachel Singer: Jessica Chastain & Helen Mirren) sounded familiar:

1965, three Mossad agents cross into East Berlin to apprehend a notorious Nazi war criminal. Thirty years later, the secrets the agents share come back to haunt them.

I would have thought we'd seen it before, but I was sure what we'd seen before was an Israeli film: The Debt (2007, directed by Assaf Bernstein, starring in the role of Rachel Brener: Neta Garty & Gila Almagor), whose description ran:

The year is 1965. Rachel Brener is one of 3 young Mossad agents...who caught "The Surgeon of Birkenau—a Nazi monster who was never brought to trial in Israel. The official reason was that he was shot as he attempted escape while being held....Today, 35 years after...[IMDb's summary of the earlier version says way too much.]

    Ah, right, the Surgeon of Birkenau. An actual Nazi doctor was so-known: Josef Mengele (1911-1979), an SS officer and a physician in the Nazi concentration camp Auschwitz. He supervised the selection of whom to kill and whom to force temporarily into labor. And, more pertinent to the plot of the two movies, he performed bizarre and murderous "medical" experiments on prisoners. But Mengele successfully fled to South America and evaded capture for the rest of his life. Neither film is based on actual fact.

Edgar Selge as Dr. Max
Rainer (Israeli version)

Jesper Christensen
as Dr. Dieter Vogel

Both films have two sets of three characters, the Mossad agents in 1965

and in 1995 [or so]. The two Rachels are clear, but in the more recent film I suffered the same confusion Roger Ebert did. As he wrote in the Chicago Sun-Times,

I was sometimes asking myself which of the two [older] men I was seeing when younger. In a thriller, you must be sure....

Israeli Version

    I personally enjoyed seeing both films and making comparisons. I didn't think the gynecological examining room scene—where Rachel, lying on her back on the table with her feet up in stirrups, jabs a hypodermic into the gynecologist's neck—could get any more electrifying, but the new version of it struck me as having a few more volts, which I attribute to Chastain's relatively more sensitive acting than that of Neta Garty.
    Especially enjoyable was seeing the scene where Jessica Chastain's Rachel shoots the fleeing Vogel and thinking (erroneously, as it turned out), Ah, so this version is significantly different from the original, Israeli version!].
    I was also trying to remember whether the messy sex triangle of the later film had been that messy in the original [no, it had not involved later marriage].
    But if you don't care about comparing two film versions of the same story, but just want to see an intelligent spy thriller, with some moral angst over a lie, either film will satisfy. Of course, if you don't want to read subtitles, there are fewer of them in the 2010 film. But you already see a lot of Jessica Chastain and Helen Mirren, and see very few Israeli films, so here's your chance!
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Copyright © 2014 by Morris Dean

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