How many excellent comedies involving the Nazis are there? To Be or Not To Be, The Great Dictator and perhaps The Producers, but Jojo Rabbit was a mess and My Neighbour Adolf is no better.
And it’s also hard to know who the intended audience is for this curious co-production between Poland and Israel (where its Russian-born director Leonid Prudovsky lives). It was filmed in Colombia and most of its dialogue is in English.
After a nostalgic pre-title scene involving a Jewish family gathering together to take a group photograph in pre-Holocaust Poland, we spin forward to an unnamed country in South America in 1960. The date is significant, it’s the year Adolf Eichmann was tracked down by Mossad agents who smuggled him out of Argentina to stand trial in Israel. Marek Polsky (David Hayman, doing his best Eastern European accent) reads the newspaper account of Eichmann’s capture with some interest. Now a bitter old man, Marek is the only survivor of that Polish family photograph.
He lives alone on the edge of town, tending his precious roses and perfecting his chess game. When a bossy German lady announces that she’s organising the renovation of the derelict house next door, Marek doesn’t hide his irritation at having a new neighbour. It doesn’t help that the "important gentleman" then moves in with an Alsatian that breaks through the fence and craps on his flowers.
Herman Herzog (Udo Kier with a ludicrous false beard) is none too friendly to his new neighbour and we are set for a cantankerous comedy of two grumpy old men battling over their respective turfs. It’s not quite Victor Meldrew territory, but one can see what attracted Hayman to the role as he gets to chew the scenery as Marek, while evoking pity when we glimpse the tattooed number on his arm.
He becomes obsessed with the idea that he is living next door to a disguised Adolf Hitler, who has somehow survived that Berlin bunker. Books and photographs about the former Führer are scoured and Marek finds plenty of parallels. Herzog paints mediocre landscapes, he’s left-handed, he’s a vegetarian, and he’s devoted to his dog, just like Hitler was to his Blondi.
Marek sets about convincing the local officials that they have the world’s biggest war criminal living in their midst but gets fobbed off for lack of evidence. In an effort to gather proof, he develops an uneasy friendship with Herzog, bonding over games of chess with shots of vodka. All these Odd Couple scenes are accompanied with an intrusive klezmer-inspired score, which relentlessly signals that this film is a comedy. If the music was stripped out, it might have been funnier; nobody likes being nagged to laugh by comic scoring.
When the truth about Herzog is revealed, the film feeds into another queasy myth about Hitler (one that has been revived recently in relation to Putin) and ends like a damp squib. One has to hope that both Udo Kier and David Hayman had more fun making My Neighbour Adolf than an audience will have watching it.
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