The Shop on Main Street (Obchod na korze)

Some great films are planned and even somewhat anticipated—visionary directors paired with talented screenwriters whose characters are brought to life by actors who have mastered their craft. While the creative process, especially one that is as collaborative as film, leaves room for well laid plans to flop at the box office, sometimes the opposite happens. Sometimes, towering achievements of cinema come from the most unlikely of places, such as the socialist republics of Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia. Obchod na korze, or The Shop on Main Street, an unassuming film from Eastern Europe became one of the greatest Holocaust films ever made, despite showing very little of the Holocaust itself.

The film tells the story of Tóno, a poor Slovak carpenter who is hired by his Nazi brother to be the Aryan administrator of a button shop run by an old Jewish woman. The film masterfully pairs the most joyful and macabre elements of the human experience in a seamless narrative that brings the immense totality of the second World War down to human scale with a small cast, a handful of sets, and a deep exploration of human emotions. The opening shots of the film include a prison yard while prisoners get their daily exercise, walking slowly in a circle in the prison’s courtyard as a band performs a playful tune in the town’s park. Street shots frequently show Jews wearing their mandated Stars of David and Nazi officers among the crowd of pedestrians, reminding us that this pleasant opening is taking place in an atmosphere of authoritarianism, tyranny, and death. Even when Markuš and Rozália visit Tóno and Evelína, the scene includes the spilling of a basin full of water and the accidental starting of a fire.

Our introduction to Tóno is while he’s watching a train pass—a train filled with Nazi soldiers and munitions. One of the cars on the train says Paris/Moskau, indicating that these soldiers, though singing merrily on the passing train, are part of Hitler’s Operation Barabarossa, the Nazis’ greatest military misstep. The Nazi regime is shipping these young men off to their deaths just as much as it later ships the town’s Jews off to their horrible fates later in the film. And yet, they are totally unaware of this. One nazi soldier reclines on a sofa on the last car on the train, playing a harmonica as he is whisked off to freeze on the Russian front. For Tóno, this disaster is only a mild inconvenience—a brief delay on his walk home.

Tóno is a lazy carpenter, fed up with his nagging wife and constantly making excuses for why he doesn’t have more money or get more work, but he is also unimpressed with the success his brother-in-law has found by becoming a commander in the Nazi party, success Tóno knows that Markuš achieved by lying, bribing, and stealing, which he then lauds over everyone from whom he stole. We can understand why he’s reluctant and unenthusiastic to take the administrator role Markuš offers him. And for good reason. Soon after his arrival at Mrs. Lautmann’s shop, he finds out that it is nearly entirely void of any buttons or fabric, and that the old Jewish woman lives off of the generosity of her Jewish neighbors. Instead of becoming a ruthless administrator collecting high fees from elderly and confused Mrs. Lautmann, Tóno instead plays the role of a friend’s cousin come to help her in the shop. Tóno later lies to his wife to hide the ruse, to make her think he’s now a successful employee of the Nazi party. The shot deliberately frames Tóno under the kitchen crucifix. In the following sequence, as he tries to open Lautmann’s shop on the Sabbath, he passes a priest carrying the Blessed Sacrament on the street, in front of which Tóno quickly crosses himself. We must ask ourselves, is he becoming a Christ figure to save the Jewish woman, or a Judas figure who will betray her? A subtle hint is given a few minutes later as Lautmann finds her late husband’s suit and gives it to Tóno to try on. To his surprise, it fits quite well.

The film is sprinkled with subtle foreshadowing and symbolism of the narrative itself. Halfway through the story, Tóno sits outside his house for a cigarette and finds a tangle of rope hanging from a stick, and on the last day of the movie’s narrative, Lautmann is wearing a black dress. The tower in the town square, which Tóno himself compares to the Tower of Babel, undergoes a slow construction which gives the audience some indication of how much time has passed in the film’s narrative as well as the progression of the story. It’s nothing but rough timber framing in the first scenes and by the end, it’s a completed monument that shines in the night—a temple of light that the Nazi regime often implemented in their architecture, propaganda, and national rallies.

Tóno, though he plays a role in the regime, is uncomfortable with the Nazi party even after stepping into his role as shadow administrator. Walking alongside Markuš, who gives the Nazi salute to everyone he sees, Tóno refuses, tipping his hat uncomfortably under his brother-in-law’s scrupulous eye, and trying to find a cross between the Nazi greeting and a standard Slovak hello, awkwardly raising his umbrella with his right hand.

The performances, writing, and direction is not to be outshined by the technical aspects of the film itself. While lesser filmmakers would film everything flat and wide, especially on small sets, in a manner reminiscent of early silent films that were essentially recorded stage plays, Obchod’s cinematographer, Vladimír Novotný, employs near constant camera movement. This constant panning and turning makes the viewer feel like he’s in the button shop with Tóno and Lautmann, navigating the store as the old woman makes tea and helps customers, and it brings the space to life with an intimacy that transforms the two lead characters from film roles to close friends. The scene where Tóno has to repeatedly ask Lautmann for help finding and pricing buttons and patterns is wonderfully charming, especially when Evelína pops in and Tóno yells at Lautmann to stop standing around like Lot’s wife, only to fumble a handful of pattern boxes to the floor.

The film also explores greed through the character of Evelína, Tóno’s insatiable wife, who quickly shows the depth of her covetousness, at first hinting that Tóno should look under the floorboards for Lautmann’s wealth. After Tóno’s first payment, she soon becomes used to the few luxuries Tóno has purchased for her, and she dreams of the wealth they will receive after ten years of his administrator position. She says that he’ll buy two fur coats, one for her and one for himself. Later when the money dries up, she gripes about how he hasn’t yet found any of Lautmann’s Jew gold.

Josef Kroner as Tóno Brtko in Obchod na korze (1965, dir Ján Kadár and Elmar Klos)

The juxtapositions between levity and the darkest emotions of the human experience continue throughout the film’s third act. When Tóno hears about the plan to roundup the local Jews onto railcars, he rushes off to warn Lautmann. What is she doing during the time of such horrible news? Haggling for a goose at the market. Tóno finds her walking back home with the goose in her handbag. It’s a humorous image in light of such a premonition. Just a few scenes later, Tóno smacks Evelína for being so insolent, then immediately goes to a bar where the guests are singing merrily to the music of the hired musicians. The singing goes out into the street to the finished monument, where a commander praises its beauty and the goal of ridding the town of Jews. A sunny dream followed by a drunken day in the shadows, hiding from a living nightmare.

Tóno goes along and plays his part in the Nazi regime’s scheme to take over Jewish businesses when he thinks he can impress his wife and milk some money out of Markuš’s scheme. But when the announcer starts calling names of Jews during the roundup, Tóno tries desperately, and drunkenly, to hide and save Lautmann from the roundup, only to momentarily turn on her to save himself, then accidentally killing her in a final attempt to hide her from approaching guards. This shocking ending to Lautmann’s life is followed by a genius stroke of cinematography. A handheld camera follows Tóno around the store, and each time it gets close to him, he looks directly into the camera and moves to a new spot. In a film where every character avoids looking into the camera, this fourth wall break is an extremely poignant portrayal of guilt that also shows us how so many civilians felt following the Holocaust. Indeed, Tóno, though a wonderfully written and portrayed character, is a Slovak everyman—a stand-in for the civilians who never liked the Nazi regime but certainly went along with their agenda when they thought they could benefit. Certainly even people like Tóno had friends and family like Evelína, pressuring them to go along with the Nazis because of what they could gain from playing some small part in their attempt at conquest. Following the war, when the horrors of the Holocaust were revealed to the world, those same civilians were racked with guilt. The eyes of the world lay upon them, judging them for their actions, and their inactions in the face of such imminent evil.

Obchod na korze not only puts us in the button shop with Tóno and Lautmann, it places us in Tóno’s shoes. By making Tóno look directly into camera, it forces us to look into a mirror and ask ourselves when we have gone along with evil, with schemes that made us feel uneasy, because we knew there was some benefit that could be extracted from such a predicament. Is it not human nature to keep one’s head down amid chaos, when the mob comes marching down the street? By pairing these dark realities of the human condition, the film manages to bring the horrors of our own acquiescence and the evil of apathy to the human level, to our own neighborhood, to our own Main Street.