“Fresh” (1994)

Boaz Yakin had an extremely strong directorial debut with this inner city thriller starring Sean Nelson, Giancarlo Esposito and Samuel L. Jackson, that earned two “thumbs up” from film critics Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel.

“A Price Above Rubies” (1998)

For Yakin’s secord directorial effort, he went the romance route with Renée Zellweger, in a drama about religious marital conflicts, earning another pair of “thumbs up” from Siskel and Ebert.

“Death in Love” (2008)

This concentration camp war drama carried a cast that includes: Josh Lucas, Lukas Haas and Adam Brody.

Death in Love, the 2008 offering from Writer/Director Boaz Yakin, deals with this among other issues. Following the story of a Mother (Jacqueline Bisset) and her two sons, we see how her actions to survive a concentration camp during the Holocaust impact her relationship and raising of the children. The Eldest Son (Josh Lucas) responds by becoming a would-be modelling agent scamming women into sexual favours with the promise of a non-existent future. The Youngest Son (Lukas Haas) finds himself in a much different world, still living with Mother and handling her survivor’s guilt almost to the point of making it his own.

This co-dependent relationship pulls Youngest Son out of interaction with peers of his own age and disallows him the opportunity to mature into a capable adult. As the movie progresses and Eldest Son’s escape of sex and control begin to unravel, he becomes more like the Youngest and looses his ability to cope. By the end of the film, instead of resolution, we find that sometimes the past is inescapable.

Death in Love was one movie that really had a profound effect on me. Death in Love is a psychological/romantic thriller about the impact that a Jewish woman’s experiences in the holocaust has on her sons. Jacqueline Bisset plays a Jewish woman who saved her own life by seducing a young doctor supervising medical experiments at a concentration camp in Nazi Germany. Many years later, the woman is married and living in New York City with two grown sons.

The sons, growing up with a mother who’s endured tremendous physical and psychological suffering in her life, have developed problems of their own. The younger son, played by Luke Haas, behaves compulsively and is locked in a co-dependent, relationship with his mother. The older son, played by Josh Lucas, works at a fraudulent modeling company making money off the aspirations of young fame-seekers. Lucas’ character drowns his emotional emptiness by engaging in affairs with multiple women. Just when he is about to lose all hope in finding meaning in life, Lucas’ co-worker, played by Adam Brody, helps him see the light.

This is a powerful movie that really reveals the emotional toll the Holocaust has on the children of survivors, something that is rarely talked about. It’s definitely worth a watch.

Lucas talks about the movie, the character he plays, and the impact of the events of the plot on his character. This is a dramatic tragedy, one the Lucas calls a feel-bad film. He describes if as a painful, violent, deeply intellectual movie, one that stays in your mind long after you’ve seen it. Movie-goers will be asking themselves if pain and guilt can actually be passed on, through the very DNA of a participant, to later generations.

The troubled and nameless character that Lucas plays represents all that is dark and despairing and hopeless. The movie is hard to watch, hard to reconcile, hard to dismiss. Beyond all the torture, all the self-loathing, all the depressing hopelessness there is a tiny glimmer, even miniscule, that reaches for normality and drudgery that signify real life.

The writer and director of Death in Love, Boaz Yakin says that Bisset was his first choice for the role. She has a fragility and sadness that you can see. Bisset says that there is currently no one in Hollywood that she wants to follow. She says none of the actresses in Hollywood have any mystery or allure about them. The elusive charisma of Bisset is oddly quaint. Young actors these days are afraid to be hostile. They are very protective of their image. Coming up in the sixties Bisset learned how to be a lady, and to also express her true feelings. She grew up in a different time. In the sixties women spoke up for what they believed in without caring about their image. Her British charm made her a perfect fit for the role.

In 1993 she got married and had two sons played by Lukas Haas and Josh Lucas. They were very different in their behaviors being raised by their mother and her problems. The younger son could not cope with life, and is very co-dependent with his mother. The older of the two is coping in a very different way. He is working at a corrupt modeling agency with another talent agent played by Adam Brody, pulling scams over on the new young and upcoming models.

It is a movie of controversy with the Holocaust scenes sometimes hard to watch, but brought the audience some understanding of the misery they were subjected to and how it would affect future generations.