In the past few years, a number of films have served as arrows of Oedipal rage from sons to their fathers, whether fiction (Noah Baumbach's The Squid and the Whale) or documentary (Mark Wexler's Tell Them Who You Are). While German director Malte Ludin's 2 or 3 Things I Know About Him falls into this category, its stakes are much higher. His father Hanns wasn't a garden-variety jerk, but a Nazi officer who presided over the murder of Slovak Jews. Since Hanns was executed in 1947, when Malte was five, Malte never really knew him.
The heart of 2 or 3 Things I Know About Him lies in a lengthy argument between Ludin and one of his sisters. She won't acknowledge the enormity of the Holocaust, preferring to use words like "deportation." He insists on facing the truth. While Ludin's clearly on the side of the angels, there's an unpleasant self-righteous streak to his statements, especially with the camera's power serving his side of the debate. That said, he later implicates himself in his family's rhetoric of denial. Ludin uses this argument with his sister as counterpoint in an intricately woven fabric of testimony. Even at its best, his film evokes the staged catharsis of American daytime talk shows, but he makes gripping cinema out of his family's inability to take responsibility for the past. The Ludins' confusion testifies to a whole nation's lapses of courage and memory. — Steve Erickson