By M. Faust

The demands of drama and those of historical accuracy seldom align, which is why movies are not a good way to learn about history.

The British film Shoshana, directed by Michael Winterbottom and playing this week at the North Park Theater, is a case in point. It takes place during the last decade of the Mandate for Palestine (1922-1947), the post-World War I decision by the League of Nations assigning Great Britain to govern the territory, which for centuries previous had been under the control of the Ottoman Empire. 

This is also the era under which Zionist emigration of Jews from Europe to Palestine reached its peak, putting the Brits in the position of trying to keep peace between two groups that were increasingly turning to violence to achieve their aims. 

That is not to say that this is a story about the birth of Israel. It is, like many other British films about their own history, about their short-sightedness and general failure of foreign rule. Given a bad hand to play, they only make things worse: the film concludes on the sound of machine gun fire that seems as if it will never end. 

The impediment here is telling this story without getting caught up in the details of the Jewish-Arab conflicts, which resonate to this day. I’m sure I didn’t need to remind you of that. Shoshana debuted at the Toronto International Film Festival in September 2023, weeks before the Israeli invasion of Gaza, which may be why the film has not been released in the U.S. until now, though if that is the case you have to wonder why the distributor decided to book it into theaters at all. 

Winterbottom (who co-wrote the script with Laurence Coriat and Paul Viragh) structures the film around a handful of actual (though heavily fictionalized) characters. Tom Wilkin (Douglas Booth) is a British officer who has lived in Tel Aviv for years and considers it his home. He tries to take a rational approach to enforcing the law, recognizing that sometimes the best policy is to turn a blind eye. Playing bad cop to his good cop is his new superior Geoffrey Morton (Harry Melling), who comes from the “Shoot ‘em all and let God sort them out” school of enforcement. 

(Booth is ridiculously good looking, like a statue of a Greek god, while Morton’s wide forehead and narrow jaw suggest a rodent, so there’s no question where our sympathies are expected to lie.)

The titular Shoshana Borochov (Irina Starshenbaum) is the daughter of the late Ber Borochov, the Russian Marxist Zionist. Employed as an office worker and part-time journalist, she is also member of Haganah, among the more pacific of the local quasi-military organizations. She is also in love with Wilkin, a relationship that no one aside from Wilkin thinks is a good idea. 

The film is being promoted as a story of love during wartime, but onscreen the romance plays as a commercial capitulation to audience requirements. The two mostly seem to argue, and if the soundtrack didn’t keep playing “The Man I Love” whenever Shoshana is onscreen we would suspect that her interest in Wilkin was limited to the occasional roll in the hay. (In real life, they lived together off and on for more than a decade.) The Russian actress Starshenbaum so commands the screen with what little time she has on it that you wish she had been given more to do. 

The bulk of Shoshana plays as a police procedural, as the Brits try to locate and neutralize the worst of the Zionist terrorists. For better or worse, Arab characters barely feature in the story at all, which feels like less of a criticism when you consider how much trouble the film has squeezing in as much of the story as it does try to present. Moments of narration filling in gaps between scenes give the impression that this two-hour film may have been whittled down from something longer, though it would take a miniseries even to begin to do justice to all the history converging here.

To be fair, what’s onscreen in Shoshana is mostly first-rate stuff. The cast is generally excellent, including the veteran Ian Hart in a small but memorable part as the British bureaucrat who oversees everything but has no power to act on any of it. Locations in Apulia, Italy, approximate the beauty that was Tel Aviv in its early days, captured with widescreen precision. I am a big fan of the prolific Winterbottom, England’s hardest working filmmaker: the size of his oeuvre is matched only by the range of his interests. He’s best known in the US for the four The Trip movies, but over the years he has excelled with literary adaptations (Jude the Obscure, Jim Thompson’s The Killer Inside Me, Tristram Shandy, the upcoming A Farewell to Arms), documentaries (The Road to Guantanamo, The Shock Doctrine) and biopics of dodgy British celebrities (24 Hour Party People, The Look of Love, Greed). He has never made a film that isn’t worth seeing, and that includes Shoshana, as long as you’re prepared for what it is and what it is not.