Amen.

Costa-Gavras stands alone in his consistent cinematic attempts to make compelling re-creations of modern history's atrocities. In the quest to turn expose into narrative, his films are easy prey to sniping over inaccuracies. The more toes his controversial honesty stamps on, the more, it seems, his essential use of poetic license becomes a target. The facts presented in Amen. hurt some very big feet through their very existence. The film dramatises the conflict of SS Lieutenant Gerstein (Ulrich Tukur), a protestant whose scientific expertise has been abused to facilitate the use Zyklon B to exterminate the Jews, gypsies and mentally infirm in wartime Germany. Once he witnesses these chemical massacres he attempts to inform the world without losing his position. Realising that no one is more willing to risk their future than him in being the whistleblower, he sticks to his post to assist the Holocaust, under the self-delusion that he is secretly making the "mass processing of units" less efficient.

Costa-Gavras invents the character of a Jesuit priest, Riccardo Fontana (Mathieu Kassovitz) to aid his storytelling and open up those implicated to include the Vatican. By following the efforts of the real German officer and fabricated priest Costa-Gavras indicates his concerns are with the moral implications of the situation rather than with a mere regurgitation of events.

Amen. is attacking the institutions (The SS, The Vatican, even the family) which inhibit the ethical actions of individuals while purporting to exist to maintain morality. We last see Gerstein reading a report on himself that questions whether he did enough as a Christian to stop the silent extermination of a race. Costa-Gavras knows that this is a rhetorical question. He presents a playing field where Gerstein's goal of keeping his conscience without becoming a traitor was inconceivable. Perhaps the reason the film has fared less well critically than Schindler's List (1993) is that Spielberg's masterpiece vindicates the story of an entrepreneur who saved lives via the system, while this work of equal artistic and historical merit offers no such heroics or success. Here the system wins and destroys the individual.

This study of the inability of the individual within the mechanisations of power influences some marvellous diegetic sequences. Costumes play a key part in the film. We are introduced to Gerstein having his uniform tailored. Just as the fabric needs to be adjusted to allow him to salute properly, it later restricts his ability to be taken seriously by the liberals whose ears he wishes to use. Similarly when Riccardo realises that the Vatican may be complicit, he takes action by adding the Star of David to his robe. Riccardo's protest is to change the clothes that protect him from the consequences of his anti-Nazi actions, to implicate him as one of those he is trying to protect. Status is symbolised by appearance in this world of eugenics and diplomacy, only those who are willing to convert their dress can keep their conscience.

The script actively avoids the blunt imagery of emaciated corpses in rags, which have unfortunately become the cliché of the Holocaust. Instead we view images of German officers peeking at the gas chambers like voyeurs through spy holes. Trains punctuate scenes. Sometimes the boxcars are open, indicating another disposed of cargo of life. Others are impenetrable, the fact we cannot see through them as before suggesting that they are full of doomed people. The black smoke that billows from the engine is a graphic match to the incinerator chimneys at the camps. This adds urgency to Gerstein and Riccardo's futile actions but also emphasises the uniformity of the Holocaust. Costa-Gavras answers why such a clean, efficient, open system was so easy for the German people to discount and so necessary for those in power outside of Germany to cover up.

Reviewed by Bob Carroll