The irresistible and timely premise of the documentary Keep Quiet revolves around the identity crisis suffered by Csanád Szegedi, a Hungarian ultra-nationalist who served in the leadership of the prominent neo-Nazi political party Jobbik. Szegedi discovers not only that he is Jewish, but that his grandmother is an Auschwitz survivor who had concealed the family secret out of fear and shame. This delightful, schadenfreude-inducing story begs for attention, but the film is unfortunately only moderately successful in capitalizing on its tremendous subject.
The film opens with Szegedi’s rise and investigates the paranoid political culture of the ultra-right, where secret Jewish ancestry is always being “discovered” in order to bribe party leaders. Szegedi assumed he, too, was being hoaxed by some penurious ne’er-do-well when he received an anonymous call about his Jewish roots. To resolve the veracity of the claim, he visited his maternal grandmother (Judaism, he informs the camera, is matriarchal), whom he had ignored for years, and after multiple visits, she finally revealed her concentration camp tattoo.
Keep Quiet begins to falter after this revelation. The film desperately hopes to portray Szegedi as a hero. This is a man confronted by a terrible epiphany that denied him the core of his identity, destroyed his social networks and left him adrift and jobless. The story becomes one of Szegedi’s recovery, self-rediscovery and conversion to Judaism.
But the narrative fails to take hold. Szegedi neither takes up the mantle of the hero nor cultivates sympathy, and his new Jewish-ness does not seem genuine. As a thought experiment, a viewer could imagine how devastating this revelation must have been for his worldview. Of course, since his worldview was hatefully and violently racist, his ideological unmooring seems more like a moral comeuppance rather than a personal crisis. There is nothing about this story that would engender pity, and the filmmakers’ portrayal simply assumes viewer sympathy as its starting point. Because of this, the documentary falls flat in its long middle act.
As an example, Szegedi asks his grandmother why she kept her Jewish identity a secret. To every other observer, the answer is blatantly obvious; her society is replete with conspiracy-mongering anti-Semites like her grandson who blame Hungary’s ills on its Jewish population. Szegedi never seems to fully grasp the magnitude of his own role. Was his racist posturing playacting? Is he just not very bright? Have any of his actions been genuine? Keep Quiet is afraid to pose these questions and makes no effort to answer such misgivings about its protagonist.
Instead, the documentary shows him on stages in Germany and Canada speaking about his new-found religion. He attempts what he believes is an apology and expresses what he views as solidarity for the trammeled-upon Jews in attendance. But what he actually says is translated more or less as “I’m as Jewish as you are and I can’t help it that that is true.” That does not ring as penitent or compassionate but as narcissistic and out-of-touch. Is a man who converted about 15 minutes ago really as Jewish as an audience that includes Holocaust survivors?
Keep Quiet does end with a flourish. Throughout the film, there are short clips of Szegedi on a train bound for Auschwitz. These scenes are not flattering as he belligerently asks a Holocaust survivor about why Jews are always complaining about the Holocaust. But when he arrives at the concentration camp ruins, the full gravity of the industrialized and deliberate extermination of Jewish humanity seems to finally affect him; he may actually get it, after all.
This powerful episode makes up for most of the sins of this film’s interminable middle act. It’s worth seeing for this scene alone, yet Keep Quiet ultimately fails to do justice to its premise.
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