Maven's Nest
Reel Life: Flick Pix
A Jewish woman idealist is a vivid reminder that tensions, violence, and yet love across differences have persisted in the contested land of Palestine/Israel for over a hundred years.
By Nora Lee Mandel
Shoshana
Directed by Michael Winterbottom
Written by Laurence Coriat, Paul Viragh, and Michael Winterbottom
Produced by Luigi Napoleone, Massimo Di Rocco, Josh Hyams, and Melissa Parmenter
121 mins. Not Rated.
UK, Italy. In English, Hebrew, Arabic and Russian with English subtitles
With: Irina Starshenbaum, Douglas Booth, Harry Melling, Ian Hart
Released by Greenwich Entertainment opens July 25 in NYC, LA, Atlanta, Chicago, Cincinnati, Orlando, Phoenix, Sarasota, Tulsa and Albuquerque; August 1 to additional theaters and in Philadelphia, Fort Worth, and more cities
Shoshana is a well-researched, gripping reminder that tensions, violence, and yet love across differences have persisted in the contested land of Palestine/Israel for over a hundred years. As he has similarly focused on portraying real individuals inside the many political tinderboxes he has tackled, British director/co-writer Michael Winterbottom sees the titular Jewish woman as a revealing hinge for this critical inflection point.
”Shoshana Borochov” (played by Russian actress Irina Starshenbaum, with her accented English) narrates the opening black-and-white archival footage and then British newsreels throughout of how “a quiet backwater of the Ottoman Empire” became her personal context. Her father Ber was the firebrand founder of Socialist Labor Zionism, who died spreading the revolutionary word in Yiddish back in his now Ukrainian homeland. Her widowed mother “Lyuba” (played by Liudmyla Vasylieva) recalls Politics was his life. It killed him., and, alongside thousands, brought their two children to Palestine in 1925. A visiting British officer admires: “Your family is a lot more exciting than mine.”
Though their father died when they were young, his daughter and son “David” (played by Hlib Sukhanov) inherited his dream “to build a new world”, where Socialism becomes mainstream through the Haganah. As a journalist, she points out the British post-World War I Mandate created martyrs with its brutal occupation against Arab and Jewish rebels, including the small revengeful, Fascist-linked Irgun. The Brits hunt for their leader, writer “Avraham Stern” played by Israeli actor Aury Alby. (Future Prime Minister Menachem Begin’s involvement is not explicitly identified.)
“Shoshana” revels in the youthful Jewish city of Tel Aviv as the locus for her own liberation, with its avant-garde Bauhaus architecture, cosmopolitan ocean-view cafes, and port where she helps settle boatloads of new Jewish immigrants to the Promised Land. (Location filming on Italy’s boot substitutes very well, plus mattes.) While she doesn’t apparently go to the Arab neighborhoods in Jaffa, she networks at nice parties where this granddaughter of a prominent rabbi seductively invites herself over to spend the night with that handsome British policeman “Tom Wilkin” (played by Douglas Booth).
Telescoping the 1930s and early 1940s, their tempestuous, and very public, relationship (themed by George Gershwin’s “The Man I Love”) is fraught with risks, while World War II shifts alliances around them. Giles Nuttgens’ cinematography adds a period sheen. Under the High Commissioner represented by Ian Hart’s “Robert Chambers”, British control tightens with the appointment of a new police boss “Geoffrey Morton”, played by Harry Melling. Informers are everywhere and terrorists ruthlessly retaliate. “Wilkin” is not naive: Everyone executes traitors. We do the same. David Holmes’ score builds up the suspense, while Marc Richardson smoothly edits in the narrated archival footage with the dramatic reenactments that emphasize the cruelties and biases on all sides. A concluding scroll provides some follow-up.
Shoshana was just a footnote in the book that initially inspired Winterbottom 15 years ago, Tom Segev’s One Palestine, Complete: Jews and Arabs Under the British Mandate (Metropolitan Books, 2000). Culture critics identify a trend in leftists’ “Mandatory nostalgia” to avoid guilt over the contemporary Occupation. In Israel she has been the subject, in titles translated from the Hebrew, of a short story, Yehuda Koren’s The British Officer's Lover (1986), and a thriller by a popular writer, Ram Oren’s Red Days: A True Story of Two Loves and One War (2006).
Winterbottom welcomes to the screen ”Shoshana” as a passionate Jewish heroine, an engaged idealist committed to her father’s now century-old vision that Arabs and Jews could live together.
7/25/2025
Nora Lee Mandel is a member of New York Film Critics Online. Her reviews are counted in the Rotten Tomatoes TomatoMeter:
Complete Index to Nora Lee Mandel's Movie Reviews
My reviews have appeared on: FF2 Media; Film-Forward; Lilith, FilmFestivalTraveler; and, Alliance of Women Film Journalists and for Jewish film festivals. Shorter versions of my older reviews are at IMDb's comments, where non-English-language films are listed by their native titles.
To the Mandel Maven's Nest Reel Life: Flick Pix
Copyright © 2025