The Boy In Striped Pyjamas

'The Boy in Striped Pyjamas' is about another lad who doesn't realise that the Holocaust is going on but unlike Giosué this is down purely to his own innocence. Bruno (Asa Butterfield) is a German boy who is forced to move to a new house when his father (David Thewlis) becomes the commandant of a concentration camp. Bruno hates their new home and misses his friends. He spends a lot of time sulking in his bedroom, where, through his window, he spots a fence behind which he sees people wearing 'striped pyjamas'.



Bruno is forbidden to leave the confines of their new house and garden but eventually, out of pure boredom, he goes exploring and finds the camp. There, amongst some implausibly slack camp security he meets a fellow eight-year-old, a Jewish inmate called Shmuel (Jack Scanlon). He soon becomes Bruno's friend and Bruno starts to visit him regularly.

It also had the implausible premise that Shmuel had not been sent straight to the gas chambers and instead, he had been set to work in the camp but still manages to sit at the camp fence undetected long enough to talk to Bruno everyday. No wonder they never seemed to get any further building the hut they were allegedly working on.



Back home, Bruno and his sister are being schooled by a private tutor. He sets about trying to brainwash the children into the Nazi way of thinking.

Bruno's mother (Vera Farmiga) isn't impressed by this and then when she finds out what they're really burning at the camp, she goes mad at the thought of her husband's part in such barbarity. She plans to take the children back to their old house but before he goes, Bruno, probably taken in by the cheery propaganda film of life in the camp that he had seen, he agrees to go under the camp fence to help Shmuel find his missing father. To do this Shmuel supplies Bruno with a set of striped pyjamas.

They are unable to find Shmuel's father but before Bruno can return home, the inmates are all marched into the shower block. Someone probably found out they hadn't really been building that hut. Both Shmuel and Bruno are trapped in there as they pile in the Zyklon B.

Everyone sat quiet right up until the end of the credits but I felt little emotion at the end.

For me, the film really missed the spot. Perhaps it was because we saw the superior 'Life Is Beautiful' on the same bill and that had a more powerful ending. The main problem with the film is that you're supposed to feel sympathy for the Germans and I simply didn't.

The camp commandant deserved to feel some grief and Bruno lost the sympathy vote when he betrayed Shmuel by giving him food when he was summoned to clean glasses in their house and then saying he stole it. This was despite the fact that he must have known the consequences because he'd already seen what had happened to their Jewish servant Pavel when he made the mistake of spilling some wine.

Also the long Hollywood build up to the ending also took the shock away. Then there's the fact that that everyone had a flawless English accent rather than their native German. The film desperately wanted to be 'Schindler's List' but it wasn't. Despite that the acting was good, some of it excellent. David Thewlis was very convincing as the camp commandant. Just as his wife described him, a monster.