Taika Waititi
Jojo Rabbit

You laugh. And it's laughter without aftertaste, because the bitterness here is kept at bay, for long stretches. The satire on the Hitler Youth is amusing, but very easy. What’s easier than mocking the Nazis and their contradictions? It’s like shooting fish in a barrel. The absurd portrayal of Jews, the absurd Aryan myth, a foolishly militaristic society. The mocking and hyperbolic tone (Jews with scales and horns, communists who “marry our dogs”) makes the issue almost obvious and accessory. There is no need to argue, it’s all bullying and gloating.

Jojo Rabbit is mainly wonderful for other reasons. Nazism symbolizes something more. It is the sum of all the myths and mental tics that adults transfer onto children, leaving them stuck between the gears of their genuine feelings and those imposed and then internalized by education, ideology, and national epic.

And in all of this, there is a wonderful mother who is a political dissident, a loving hen, and also a father if necessary. A beautiful mother who must endure the political enthusiasms of her ten-year-old son, even support them, but connecting them to her world of affections, the sweet world of a mother who worries about her son's scraped knees, but also tells him that those horrible scars on Jojo’s face are nothing, that they'll soon go away. She recites optimism with a broken heart.

Scarlett Johansson’s character captivates; you can’t help but fall in love with her. And while the State might seem very masculine, it reveals itself to be a boastful child, full of mad convictions, always frowning like little Jojo. In reality, the boy just wants to feel accepted, he wants a caress. And, in the same way, the State can only be saved by mothers like Scarlett, while husbands die in war. If they don’t save it, they can rekindle its sense of feelings, the necessity of peace, the dignity of being in love, even with a Jew.

The film has a somewhat limping rhythm, alternating between slightly bland parts and others that are very successful, even visually. Funny blunders, caricature characters, and then moral depth, different emotional tones. There are shots that stay impressed, and one concerns a pair of feet with enameled shoes. There is a bit of unnecessary anti-Nazi rhetoric that dilutes the quality, but some moments are remarkable and, on the whole, the antithetical mechanism works. By showing us the children's enthusiasm for Nazism, the implicit absurdity of a childish whim is unmasked.

A basic, easy objective, to which is added the very tender struggle of a child between good and spontaneous feelings and inexplicably hostile but well-settled superstructures. Jojo in the face of love cannot explain why that feeling, according to Hitler, would be wrong. When he lives, Jojo understands that this doctrine clashes with the normal flow of life and feelings. It is a furious whim of an eternal child who does not live, who shelters in his pathetic castle.

The Führer played by Waititi himself is amusing, serving as a prosopopoeia of the little Jojo's soul, between slapstick gags and amusing ideological hyperboles. The dialogues between Jojo and his chubby friend are very sweet, mixing absurd war issues and normal adolescent confidences. “I almost have a girlfriend, but she is Jewish.”