THE BURNING COLD - CAMBRIDGE FILM FESTIVAL
Et Rot! It’s the Catalan for ‘a mess’ and suitably describes ‘The Burning Cold’. It is a such a rot that it is hard to know where to begin. The premise seems promising: a Jewish family escaping the Nazis is holed up in the mountains of Andorra. Hidden by a peasant family, tensions rise beyond boiling point as the risks of harbouring the Jews is death. So far so good. But the problem with this movie is that it tried to have more peaks than the Pyrenees. The plot seemed to expand with each minute encompassing bloody family feuds, a ridiculous secret code palaver and clunky flashbacks that seem to be have been stitched together from the cutting room floor. The Andorran village is terrorised by a lone SS officer played by Daniel Horvath. He is the epitome of the crazed, evil Nazi complete with mad glint and Boy’s Own smirk. He lacks only the ‘Ello Ello’ scar. I waited patiently for the cry, ‘For you ze war is over’. He roams around the village on his horse lazily taking pot shots at the poor locals, bullying the peasantry. Though our heroine is indeed reluctantly hiding a Jewish family, our SS Aryan in his dandy Hugo Boss uniform can’t be bothered to find them.
Greta Fernandez
The historical inaccuracies in this film are almost insulting – one example: though in hiding, the Jewish man managed to conduct a full funeral rite in the open air complete with Hebrew prayers. An SS officer is killed by the villagers with no seeming consequences (in reality the whole village would be razed).
Anything to recommend this rot? In the starring role, Greta Fernandez has, it must be said, a magnetic quality and her stubborn peasant dignity was sort of believable. But the film bathes in gratuitous violence – a bloody amputation here, a blown off head there and throw in a savage rape and beating or two. This was a spaghetti western version of WWII.
We learn next to nothing about the family in hiding except the young Jewish father carries with him secret codes that could help end the war (John Buchan thy name is called). We are told zero about why the SS are in the village and what their war aims might be. There are spectacular shots of the Andorran mountains in the bitter winter but to be honest, this film left me feeling extremely cold.
