Taika Waititi is a very special person. A joker who can pretend to sleep in public when it comes to his Oscar nomination. One of the few directors today who understood the inventiveness that made comedies so beautiful. Someone who understood that humour is not just for laughing. In short, Taika Waititi is a comedian, but also, Taika Waititi is a director, maybe even THE director, the one who will bring back laughter. A director who knows the timing, framing and editing required to exploit the full potential of a visual goof worthy of the best screwball comedies, who knows how to write a meta or frontal joke and articulate it so that the smile it elicits is permanent and its use inexhaustible.
Recognized at the beginning only by small circles of moviegoers, Taika Waititi became known in a short time as one of the best comedy directors of today, by positioning himself there he would be easily heard and always aiming right in his humor, both visual and textual. Expected so much for his future projects, what was expected at the turn was his next film, a satirical comedy centered on a child in Nazi Germany. A premise that finds its stamp in the current trend where the extreme right is becoming more and more heard.
Jojo Rabbit not only has a good point to make but is also full of good ideas. The grace of a director who picks the right inspirations (apart from The Dictator) which are not the most obvious. The best and, dare we say it, the most daring, that of making the hero a little boy so passionate about Adolf Hitler that he made him his imaginary friend.
The film is thus carried to the bone by a Nazi child, reflecting a youth in search of a reference point, letting itself be indoctrinated by the ideas of its elders. This idea alone illustrates Waititi's humanist approach, judging no one, making no amalgamations, he shows that racism is above all a story of preconceived ideas carried by unjustified fear. He never inspires anger or anger to reproduce and repeat the worst fascist teachings, he always carries them out innocently as the child he is, only emulating the gestures that the Nazis reduced to the rank of games for children.
An unhealthy atmosphere that the director always manages to make watchable and reflective, either with his humour or by contextualizing it in a more comfortable situation for the viewer, often by means of the childlike vision of the little one. A training camp for Hitlerian Youth is like a summer camp, Hitler whose presence is summed up as that of a father jester by Waititi himself. The latter always manages to divert the meaning of propaganda to make a joke with the same evocative force. One will note the multiple caricatured prejudices taught about the enemies of the Reich represented as monsters of children's books showing all the cretinism of indoctrination or the Nazi salutes nonchalantly repeated to the point of absurdity.All perfectly directed material that gains in intensity in a final game where Waititi cleverly turns all the meaning behind his previous jokes to bring out the darkest facets, where the child becomes a witness to the collapse of his convictions to serve as a pretext for useless sacrifices in the name of a deadly vision.
This end could not be so good if it did not benefit from such a controlled evolution, and it owes this to its colourful characters. Whether it is Jojo's mother trying to maintain the spark of childlike life in him, Elsa the young Jewish girl hiding in his house, Captain Klezendorf and to a lesser extent Hitler himself; each of them is linked to the hero while being opposed to each other. It is thus by being in a delicate position of constant conflict that little Jojo must learn to make choices and to act on both sides of the moral issue while each of his contacts tries to draw him into their way of thinking. Waititi is losing his character more and more but gives him more and more reference points to hold on to. Love at first sight, a bad joke, a sham or even mourning are key moments that energize the story and renew the little boy's encounter with his childhood after having swapped it for a society that gives its citizens no choice but to follow the prescribed labels.
Jojo Rabbit is a film with a lot of heart that approaches its themes with simplicity. It doesn't judge people who give their free will to others, it shows that the identity that others stick to us is easily replaceable, that it's never too late to be a good person capable of doing good and, above all, that life deserves to be celebrated by dancing (preferably on David Bowie's Hero).