A young Austrian Jew hides out in the nightclub scene in this 1930s-set drama based on a real story – and inspired by countless other tales of Jews in exile in Europe
It is 1938 and the Austrian Anschluss is unfolding. In Vienna, the Jewish Knoller family must make some hard choices. While one brother is sent to stay in America, younger sibling Freddie (Lucas Lynggaard Tønnesen) must fend for himself as his parents opt to stay behind – a choice that is clearly not going to end well. While the film cuts back and forth between periods, we see Freddie on a death march with other Jewish prisoners in one timeframe, and trying to make his way to the UK via France in another.
In the westward-bound section, Freddie ends up in Paris, broke and desperate but eager for a bit of glamour all the same. An encounter with raffish but slippery Christos (Fernando Guallar), another immigrant, results in Freddie securing a job in the Opéra neighbourhood persuading Nazi soldiers with his perfect fluent German to come to a nightclub he and Christos work for. This is how he hopes to raise enough money to pay for forged papers. What follows tracks closely to dozens of similar stories about Jews in exile in Europe during the second world war, compelled to keep their identities secret, and while the film is in fact based on the story of a real-life Freddie Knoller, the cliched treatment rather drains it of the plausibility it needs to make it distinctive.
