(IMAGE: Music, War, and Love)
Gravitas Ventures, 2019. 116 minutes. Romance/Drama
Grade: 2.5 out of 4
If I’m being totally honest, a movie that presents itself as Romeo and Juliet, but with young classical musicians in Nazi-occupied Poland, my inclination is to tense up like I just got handed ten pages of homework. Literally nothing about it sounds appealing, and yet I’ll Find You is a handsomely mounted production of the sort that used to play to larger adult audiences but nowadays might book a week with the Laemmles at best.
The Romeo and Juliet comparison, for a start, is unfair. Yes, the lead character says, out loud, in case we miss it, “She’s Jewish and I’m Catholic — there couldn’t be a crush!” But it takes two to make a doomed romance, and the Juliet in this telling remains offscreen for much of the movie, making it just plain Romeo. And neither of them is dramatically suicidal; in fact, the entire point is that they can survive something as horrific as the Holocaust and keep trying to find each other nonetheless.
As the story begins, singer extraordinaire Robert (Leo Suter) has returned to his old music school after a two-year absence to find that his childhood crush, violinist Rachel (Adelaide Clemens) is engaged to a wealthy Jewish man named David, whose family lives in the safe, relatively Nazi-proof nation of Switzerland. Robert and Rachel accept that this is for the best, and that they can’t be together, but the night before her family are scheduled to leave, Germany invades Poland, cutting off all transportation escape routes. Instead of going to be with her fiancee, Rachel and her family must instead move into the secret attic room of the music school, and hope for a better outcome than Anne Frank.
Robert joins the resistance, while Rachel and family get hauled off by Germans, at which point he makes the vow that gives the movie its title. But can his Catholicism provide enough cover when he goes deep into the heart of Nazi Germany? Even with the aid of famous opera singer Benno Moser (Stellan Skarsgard, lip-syncing gloriously)?
I’ll Find You‘s biggest surprise is its director: Martha Coolidge, best known for ’80s popular faves Real Genius and Valley Girl. It’s safe to say Leo Suter is not a discovery on the level of Val Kilmer or Nicolas Cage, but the story nonetheless feels in good hands, once again balancing realistic youthful yearnings with (musical) genius and cultural prejudices. A sequence that has Robert and Benno performing a concert in Auschwitz, performing the subtext-laden Carmen, where they could be killed if he evinces the slightest hint of recognition when he sees Rachel, is a nail-biter. And Skarsgard singing “Hitler…has only got one ball!” as a singing demo to Robert should be a memeable moment. Stephen Dorff, meanwhile, is unrecognizable as a Nazi double-agent. Accents run all over the place — initially all the youngsters sound English and the adults Polish, but once Skarsgard and Dorff come in it’s kind of a free-for-all.
The last act stretches things a bit, as the war winds down, and Robert travels the globe from scene to scene with the most meagre of leads. Wasn’t international travel, like, hard in those days? And how exactly is this Romeo and Juliet, again? Spoiler: it’s not. But that’s generally for the best, since Shakespeare’s teens gave up too easily in comparison to Robert. However, by making this effectively just one side of the story, it makes it more a quest narrative than a typical romance. When Rachel finally tells her side of the story, it’s compelling enough that we wish we’d actually seen it, too.
Shot mainly in Poland, I’ll Find You is laden with authentic-feeling locations, sets, and costumes, without feeling overly beholden to authenticity. Its broad historical strokes are certainly true, but there’s a bit of movie logic in play to ensure viewers go home mostly happy. It’s no insult to say this is one you can probably take your grandparents to, and not be miserably bored the entire time.