Jojo Rabbit Film Review

“Let everything happen to you -Beauty and terror- Just keep going. No feeling is final”

It is not very easy to cry on a satire. But that’s exactly what Jojo Rabbit tends to do to you.  You cry because of the broken parts that it chooses to portray via the medium of comedy, and the you heal as the broken bits put themselves together. That is the thing about comedy, it questions hierarchies, shatters the social structures that we enjoy surrounding ourselves with.

We step in the shoes of a ten year old boy trying to make sense of a world full of hate.  Yes it is film that has been presented with Oscars, but my respect for the effort doesn’t quite stop there. A confused boy, Jojo through his academy, is taught systemic biases, and not surprisingly, is left to deal with many conflicts of his own. Scarlett Johnson as an insightful and always wise mother, and Taika Wattiti as an imaginary but believable Adolf Hitler, all piece together a very fine story of the roller coaster that we call human experience.

“Love is the strongest thing in the World.” Scarlett tries to convince her son, as he is adamant on defining his identity as a true, Jew-hating Nazi. Well he disagrees with her all his childhood, but suddenly matures ( spoiler alert) when he loses her, finally understands what she was trying to say all this while and realises the destructive nature of every process he has ever been a part of. So you can understand when he says- “Nothing makes sense anymore.” Talk about having an existential crisis.

Anyway, I hundred out of hundred recommend a watch this lockdown, and if you have already seen it, then I definitely recommend a rewatch- like an onion, this film’s meaning unfolds in layers.

But for now, at least as far as I am concerned, as Jojo’s best friend Yorki said to him after the war- “I am going home to my mother, I need a cuddle.”