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On the other hand, there are no Jews in this town, and the film contains no reference at all to the Holocaust. "When it comes to horror, all ideas are equal," Berri has the intelligently spoken Nazi say. But that's too smooth a dismissal of the terrible consequences of certain intellectual abominations. Some ideas really are more equal than others in their destructive power. Yet even as one condemns this sophistry, one has to acknowledge Berri's courage in thinking about what must be for him, as a Jew, the unthinkable. The power, as well as the perversity, of his movie derives from the same source: a need to reimagine a historical passage long since encrusted with right-thinking cliches.