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Review by Mark Dujsik | June 22, 2023

In the midst of war and other horrors, life does somehow continue to the extent that it can. That's the case for the characters and scenario of Love Gets a Room, set in the Warsaw ghetto in the early days of 1942about 15 months after more than 400,000 Jews were forced into this small, walled-off section of the city. Disease, hunger, and death are the terrible norm in this place, but there must be other norms, tooones to remind people that life moves forward and is worth living in spite of the increasing hopelessness and helplessness of the ghetto.

Co-writer/director Rodrigo Cortés takes a single eventsomething that certainly did happen in the Warsaw ghettoand fictionalizes the specifics of the story around that event, in order to give us some sense of why something so ordinary would be so vital and harrowing in this time and place. The occasion is the performance of a play: a contemporary musical comedy, if one can believe it, that's set in and tries to find the humor, as well as the small pieces of hope of living in, the ghetto.

The likely surprise here, announced during the opening credits, is to learn that Cortés and David Safier's screenplay features excerpts of an actual play. It was written by Jerzy Jurandot, a forced inhabitant of the ghetto who also helped to run a theater there. In Cortés' film, the playwright is present, although existing by a different name, and acting in his own play, a romantic comedy of sorts about a couple who are shocked to discover that one of their new roommates, another unofficially married couple, is the former flame of the first couple's wife.

The setup of the play-within-the-film is a classic one, but as performed over the course of a cold afternoon in this story, it will surely catch most people off-guard for the way the plot, the jokes, and the songs reference or depend upon the conditions of the ghetto. A long debate, particularly when it comes to the more popular forms, is whether art should reflect the reality of life or provide entertainment as a way to momentarily escape it. From what we see of Jurandot's play, it takes the position that art must fully acknowledge the realities of the world in order for any kind of temporary escape from it to be possible.

Cortés and Safier's story is, in part and more literally, about escape, appropriately. While the play unfolds on the stage of the Femina Theatre to a packed house, the film also gives us some backstage drama, as some of the actors, including the playwright, endure their own romantic triangle of sorts, worry about the play being interrupted by Nazi soldiers or Jewish police for some "subversive" material being presented on stage or passed through the crowd, and try to determine which among them are able to or worthy of leaving the country while everyone else is left behind.

That story focuses on Stefcia (Clara Rugaard), an actress playing one of the lead roles in the play. An opening one-take follows Stefcia's distressing daily walk from her home to the theaterpassing dead bodies on the street, witnessing people being arrested or killed in public, hiding from soldiers with orders to detain or shoot anyone suspected of "illegal" activities. As shot by cinematographer Rafa García, there's a chilly, washed-out look to the outdoor scenes, but as soon as Stefcia finally arrives at the theater, the stage lights are warm and inviting, even if the shadows of the areas of the wings and beyond are like ominous passageways to the horrors outside.

In the behind-the-scenes plot, Stefcia is currently in a romantic relationship with Edmund (Ferdia Walsh-Peelo), who also plays her character's unofficial husbandmarriage being outlawed for Jews under the Nazi occupationin the play. On their "honeymoon" in a new apartment, the on-stage couple are soon joined by another, arranged by the city's housing council to share the cramped space. They're played by Patryk (Mark Ryder), the playwright, and Ada (Valentina Bellè), and just as Patryk's character was once involved with Stefcia's, the author and the leading lady were once in love.

The main complicationas the convoluted comedy plays out to an audience that laughs, groans, and stomps their feet in recognition and appreciationis that Patryk has arranged a bribe with an SS officer in the ghetto. He and one other person will be allowed passage beyond the ghetto's walls, and Patryk wants Stefcia to join him. She doesn't want to leave Edmund, whom she loves, and his little sister to suffer and likely die in this place.

All of this happens in real time, and with Cortés and García's camera moving with propulsive curiosity about the lives and actions of these characters, the film possesses the momentum of a thriller. That's especially true as one an older actor (played by Henry Goodman), playing a conniving schemer (A couple of the actors object to the character's existence in the show), offers Stefcia a way of selling her body to have a comfortable life and a pamphlet begins making the rounds among the audience. It's particularly the case with the arrival of a Nazi officer (played by Magnus Krepper), who initially seems to be there to enjoy the playif that's even possible for such an individual.

Love Gets a Room shows us a lesser-known aspect of life in the Warsaw ghetto. The show here must go on, if only because it's the sole means of any form of escape for which the majority of the people can hope.

Copyright © 2023 by Mark Dujsik. All rights reserved.