'Europa, Europa'

Europa, Europa is 112 minutes long and it took about 107 minutes for me to realize that its based on a true story.

I think I enjoyed it more thinking it was fiction. Do you think we view or process things differently because we know its true or false? I think so. I just don't know how.

Don't biopics get boring? If you're not bored during the first viewing, they're not typically films you can rewatch time and again. At the end of the day, we like escaping and if you can have a true story that seems too hard to believe, like Europa, Europa.

The film follows Solomon Perel, a teenage boy living in Germany with his Jewish family. During the Night of the Broken Glass, Perel's family shoe shop is destroyed and his sister killed.

The family emigrates to Poland, where they think they can be safe from Nazi Germany. Instead, Germany invades in 1939 pulling the family apart. Solomon and his brother Isaac attempt to escape, but are separated. Solomon winds up in a Russian orphanage where he is indoctrinated into the communist brotherhood (and where he's forced to abandon his religious beliefs to fit in). Once the Russian-Nazi truce is broken, Solomon is pulled from side to side attempting to A) stay alive in the war and B) stay alive from the Nazi Holocaust machine.

He joins the Nazi army and becomes a war hero. Still a teenager, he is sent back to Berlin to join the Hitler Youth. Again, he struggles to not only keep his cultural secret, but also to control the typical teenage urges (not sexing up Julie Delpy). Through some fortunate coincidences, Solomon not only avoids being found out, he winds up avoiding death when a Russian officer hands a Holocaust survivor a pistol to carry out his execution. At the moment of death, Isaac finds his brother and they embrace.

I learn that its a true story in the final minute when the real Solomon is there in a field singing.

That's as good as fiction.