Balanced spoke movie

“The Pattern Butterfly,” a 1991 English-dialect coat by Czech overseer Karel Kachyna, has elements in average with “Schindler’s List” beyond merely its Holocaust theme. Primarily, there’s a passion-thrifty list of Jewish names that serves as a colourful fulcrum.

For the sake of comparison, I decided finally to see Steven Spielberg’s saga about the destruction of Polish Jewry. This I did while pondering a recent essay by author and teacher Melvin Jules Bukiet, published in The Washington Post’s Outlook section, in which Bukiet argues that storytelling (excluding works by Holocaust survivors) “cannot communicate this particular history.” That “any narrative reproduction of the machines of murder diminishes evil.” That, by implication, the truth of the Nazi war against Jews, unique somehow in a vast record of human viciousness, is too sacred to be attached to words like “Steven Spielberg’s saga.”

Contrary to Bukiet’s passionately expressed “fear that art itself will overwhelm atrocity,” “The Last Butterfly” demonstrates, as does “Schindler’s List,” the precious power of art to transmit emotional truths about history, if not the factual completeness of history.

It should not be a condemnation of filmmaking to acknowledge that “The Last Butterfly” isn’t as agonizing to watch as the reality of genocide is to imagine. Nor should it diminish the Holocaust to realize that understanding these events requires more than feeling some huge, heavy, black, simple sense of absolute evil. “The Last Butterfly” is virtually a metaphor for the value of the artistic imagination in the face of horror. British actor Tom Courtenay stars as Antoine Moreau, an esteemed French pantomime artist on the skids in Nazi-occupied Paris. Moreau comes under the thumb of the Nazis when he discovers that his girlfriend, killed in capture, was a member of the French Resistance. By this time Moreau has already shown onstage the moral courage for which mimes are renowned. Right under the noses of German officers, his whimsical routine about a jumping dog evolves into a mockery of the stiff-armed Nazi salute. Moreau’s arms and legs take on lives of their own, jutting outward despite his attempts to restrain them. This is director Kachyna’s first modest display of the idea of art as a medium for emotional truths.

With the promise of freeing him afterward, the Nazis send Moreau — a gentile — to the Jewish ghetto of Terezin, Czechoslovakia, for a special performance. The details of this performance are kept vague by the ghetto’s overseers, but Moreau, living among the Jews in their privation, finds out quickly that tragedy and danger are in the air and soil of this place. As in “Schindler’s List,” the “transport” train is a chilling and recurring image in “The Last Butterfly.” Through Vera (Brigitte Fossey), a caretaker of the ghetto’s children, Moreau learns that whichever Jews he selects to be involved in his special performance will be spared — temporarily, at least — from the cattle cars. Thus, Moreau’s list: the many small children, and a few old musicians, who will help him stage his fairy tale.

When Moreau realizes that his performance was designed as a sham to impress visiting Red Cross officials (”We are fine in the City of the Jews,” other youngsters recite in a Nazi-supervised rehearsal), the artist switches the program. Moreau’s elaborate version of “Hansel and Gretel” includes the film’s most striking visual image — rows of children in flame-red costumes, waving their arms to simulate the consuming fire of the witch’s oven. Other children, wearing the compulsory yellow Star of David, are pushed screaming into the flames. Again, the artistic imagination renders an emotional truth in a way no history book could, in a way that transcends the simple, factual declaration: “Children were murdered.”

Throughout “The Last Butterfly” are scenes and images that make us feel the evil of Nazism in unusual ways. Although the Jewish characters all wear the yellow star, there’s something striking about seeing that star on mannequins in a store window. And the sight of two elderly women with toothless smiles, dancing feebly to an ocarina’s tune — celebrating the fact that they weren’t chosen for the latest transport to the death camps — is a haunting definition of the perverse nature of joy in this sorrowful place.

Moreau, as delicately portrayed by Courtenay, is a more clearly heroic figure than Spielberg’s inscrutable Oskar Schindler. And this heightens the impact of Kachyna’s ending, which offers nothing akin to Spielberg’s relieving images of rescue.

“The Last Butterfly” may not be real, but it’s true.

“The Last Butterfly” is not rated but contains nudity and adult themes.