Jojo Rabbit

**Jojo Rabbit: when satire confronts horror**

Germany, 1944. A ten-year-old boy, a fan of the Hitler Youth, discovers that his mother is hiding a Jewish girl in the attic. What starts as a conflict of loyalties —between the fanaticism that has been sold to him and the instinct that screams that something is not right— ends up being one of the most uncomfortable and necessary comedies in recent cinema. *Jojo Rabbit* is not a film about Nazism: it's about how a myth is dismantled from within, with painful laughter and a breathtaking finale.

Taika Waititi, director and screenwriter, gets into the skin of an imaginary Hitler —ridiculous, pathetic, almost an invisible friend— to disarm the cult of the leader with a mix of absurdity and tenderness. The cast, with Scarlett Johansson as the rebellious mother and Sam Rockwell as a Nazi captain so clumsy that he seems to be taken from a sketch, works because no one makes the easy joke. Comedy here is not an ornament: it's the scalpel that opens the wound so that it hurts less, but still hurts.

It was no coincidence that the Golden Globes crowned it as the best musical comedy in 2020. *Jojo Rabbit* dares to laugh at what no one should laugh at, and does so without resorting to cheap parody. The merit lies in the fact that, after each laugh, the bitter aftertaste of knowing that the horror was real remains. And that, in the end, is what makes it great: it doesn't let you look away.

A biting farce that dissects Nazism with tenderness and uncomfortable laughter; essential.

" Hitler is not a very nice guy, is he? — Adolf Hitler

" Who is she? Why is she here? — Johannes Betzler