“I’ve always felt this movie is an emotional journey as opposed to a purely narrative journey,” says Jeremy Podeswa of Fugitive Pieces, the Toronto filmmaker’s adaptation of Anne Michaels’ novel. “The book is like that, too. Somehow Anne Michaels manages to make it a sustained reading experience that is so purely emotional, even though it is intellectual. I felt like that if the movie was going to work, it had to work on that level — it had to hit people deeply and consistently.”

That Podeswa comes so close to reaching that aim is remarkable. In his first feature since 1999’s The Five Senses, Podeswa accomplishes the nigh-impossible task of preserving the richness of feeling and compassion in Michaels’ 1996 book about Jakob Beer, a Polish boy who is rescued from the Nazis by a Greek archeologist. Though raised far from those horrors in Toronto, he never escapes his memories of the family he lost in the Holocaust. His attachment to the past inevitably affects his relationships with the archeologist Athos (Rade Serbedzija) and first wife Alex (Rosamund Pike).

With its brisk pacing, its emotional directness and a richly nuanced performance by Stephen Dillane as the adult Jakob, Podeswa’s adaptation is a work of great sensitivity and beauty.

Even so, the extent of his achievement threatens to be overshadowed by the film’s imperfections (e.g., some bumpy shifts between the many times and places within the narrative) and the decision to revise the ending in the wake of Fugitive Pieces’ mixed reception at the Toronto International Film Festival last September. While more faithful to Michaels’ book, the original ending proved problematic. The new one will strike some as heretical — Michaels has called the changes “controversial for me” — but Podeswa recently defended it to Playback magazine by saying that it better preserved “the goodwill and intensity of feeling that the film engenders throughout.”

The choice was hardly the only difficult one for Podeswa. Interviewed on the eve of Fugitive Pieces’ premiere at TIFF, he’s upfront about his two connected but not necessarily complementary goals with his adaptation. One was to preserve the story’s core themes about tragedy, sacrifice, memory and the “redemptive power of love.” The other was to make something that was accessible whether or not viewers had read the book. As he says, “I didn’t want it to get bogged down in any specifically literary quality. It was just my intention to keep it moving, to not be indulgent with it and to make it a pleasing viewing experience.”

Upon first reading the book — which had a special relevance to him as the son of a Holocaust survivor — Podeswa noticed how it forced him to read in a very unusual way. “The book is a sustained work of poetry,” he says. “It does have a strong narrative line and very compelling characters but it’s full of metaphor and poetic description and poetic feeling. It was such a unique reading experience. I did feel pretty much right from the beginning if you could find as a filmmaker a cinematic equivalent to that poetic language, you could really be onto something interesting.”
Appropriately lyrical without seeming unduly fussy, Fugitive Pieces fits that description well. A primary source of the film’s strength is Dillane, the British actor familiar from such films as The Hours and Welcome to Sarajevo. In an interview at TIFF last September, Dillane admits that it wasn’t so much the character that attracted him to the project but the idea that the story presented “a world that’s worth talking about.” He praises Jakob’s “courage in facing his memories and the facts of the Holocaust,” yet he also sees the essential story of the film in terms of liberation. The reason Jakob lives in his head is because that is where he keeps his family. He is transformed when a late-life romance forces him out into the sensual world.

“His gradual descent into his full body is the journey of the film in the end,” says Dillane. “You hope that’s there’s a kind of Ecce Homo feel about it — here is the man in all his fragility, vulnerability, power and strength. The story does something to us; it liberates us too.”
That feeling of liberation is powerfully evoked by the final scenes. The new ending may replace a jarringly sombre note for an excessively rosy one, but the movie’s cumulative effect remains uncommonly affecting. In that aspect, it shares something with the films that provided Podeswa with a model for Fugitive Pieces.

“The movies that have really moved me in the past are movies where you feel a human connection,” he says. “In a way, you feel like you understand something about the human condition, or you feel like you’ve been understood. The movie taps into something deep in you — that’s what great art does.

“Nobody has the golden key to be able to do that,” he adds, “but I think it is a very valuable thing to aspire to when you’re creating.”