My Best Enemy follows the see-sawing fortunes of a Viennese Jewish art dealer and his Aryan friend through the war, a falling out coming early on as the latter joins the SS and becomes complicit in the former's imprisonment. This promises to be grim fare, so it's a surprise both pleasant and discomfiting that the director opts for a comic tone for large swathes of the story. There is a certain coming-of-age in the sense that it is taken as read that we know by now what horrors occurred in history, and that it may finally be acceptable to use the historical backdrop as just that: only a context and not the subject itself, which is basically the fracturing relationship of two men, with the SS after a Michelangelo drawing in the dealer's possession.
For the most part, the film manages to avoid stepping on any sensitive toes and generates a fair deal of zippy dialogue, with Moritz Bleibtreu as solid as ever as the lead. It's not a revelatory piece in any sense, nor does it purport to be, but it does make a nice change that the Jew for once is not merely a helpless victim to be bailed out by a good German, as in
The Pianist and many others with the same starting position.
6/10
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