A Real Pain, the ambivalences of a journey down memory lane

In his second feature film, presented at the Sundance Film Festival, Jesse Eisenberg appears even more confident behind the camera. After his debut with When You Finish Saving the Worldwhich the New York Times had labeled as “very Jesse Eisenberg”, the director offers an on-the-road drama following two cousins, David – played by Eisenberg himself – and Benji Kaplan, played by Kieran Culkin. The two undertake a journey to Poland, from Warsaw through places marked by the Holocaust, on the occasion of the death of their grandmother Dory, a Jewish woman of Polish origin who had managed to flee and escape. install in the United States.

This trip represents not only an opportunity to honor the memory of their grandmother by respecting her last wish, but also an opportunity to find each other despite their differences in character: David is anxious, methodical and leads a well-structured life in New York , with a job, a wife and a child. Benji, on the other hand, is emotional, impulsive and poorly integrated into the American frenzy. Unemployed and with a personal history that is not very detailed but suggests difficulties, Benji displays a strong class consciousness throughout the film, showing sensitivity and denouncing without restraint the hypocrisies and contradictions of the organized tour and of his fellow travelers in Poland : Marcia, recently divorced, middle-aged couple Mark and Diane, Eloge, survivor of the Rwandan genocide, and James, the tour guide.

The film seeks to explore the theme of pain in its many facets, from the weight of intergenerational trauma to the more intimate and daily pains, which risk being erased in the face of the scale of the Holocaust. These themes emerge through incisive, funny lines and dynamic dialogue. However, the director’s goal of juggling drama and comedy does not always achieve his goal of conveying the depth of the narrative with lightness, sometimes falling into a certain superficiality. The characters, sometimes reduced to archetypes, do not always rise to the level of the story. Despite many interesting avenues for reflection – the multiplicity inherent in American identity, the commercialization and mechanization of the memory of the Holocaust – the rapid pace of the story sometimes tends to stifle the quest and introspection of the two cousins.

One of the film’s strong points lies in its deep connection to Polish territory, represented in its diversity between history and modernity. Even the Jewish ghetto has not escaped capitalist gentrification: symbolic places of the Holocaust are now flanked, as James points out, by fast food chains. Eisenberg pays particular attention to monuments, Soviet brutalist architecture and the often desolate landscapes between Warsaw and Lublin, notably including the sites of the Majdanek concentration camp. This choice skilfully reflects the contradictions and paradoxes of the double journey, both collective and personal, of the two characters.

In short, the film is successful: between irony and drama, Jesse Eisenberg explores the difficulty of losing oneself and the beauty of finding oneself.