Parents' Guide to Shoshana

The founding of the State of Israel is rarely the topic of big-budget filmmaking. In Shoshana, prolific British director Michael Winterbottom dips a toe into the political complexities via the romantic relationship between a Jewish woman and a British man. Arab characters are mostly absent from the film; instead, the differing factions within the Jewish population are explored—some with more peaceful approaches than others—alongside the peacekeeping attempts of the British, which are often rooted in violence themselves. The central characters are based on real-life people, but the narrative itself is fictional for the most part. It's not a swooning love affair that's portrayed here either, but a story of two people caught between their backgrounds and beliefs in an increasingly impossible situation. Overall, it's as much political thriller as it is a romance, and so much of the screen time is spent with Booth's Tom and Harry Melling's Geoffrey tracking down various underground leaders, that their relationship becomes almost as much the focus. The backdrops are stylish (though it was filmed in Italy rather than Tel Aviv), and the costumes add great period flair. The strong production values are no surprise, given that it took the director 15 years to get this project onto the screen. It's successful for the most part, but it spreads its focus so thinly across different storylines at times that it doesn't quite make enough impact in any one.