'Blessed Is the Match: The Life and Death of Hannah Senesh'
A heroine of the Holocaust
In 1944, a young Hungarian named Hannah Senesh parachuted into Nazi-occupied Eastern Europe. A few years earlier, she had discovered Zionism, left Europe before the Germans descended, and arrived in Palestine before it became Israel. The occasion for her homecoming was a clandestine British military mission to locate downed fliers and rescue endangered Jews, one of whom was Senesh's mother.
"Blessed is the Match: The Life and Death of Hannah Senesh," which opens tomorrow at the Museum of Fine Arts, recounts its subject's wartime derring-do as both an act of political heroism and matter of daughterly duty. The movie gathers information from people who know Senesh's story (assorted academics, President Shimon Peres of Israel) or who knew Senesh, and builds an absorbing story out of this woman's compatible loyalties.
The director, Roberta Grossman, uses every trick she has to make Senesh's story memorable. Joan Allen reads from Catherine Senesh's book about her daughter, and Alona Tal reads from Hannah's diaries and letters. Grossman fashions the narration, interviews, and a wealth of archival footage into a coherent movie whose twists and emotional entanglements point toward a grander project. "Blessed Is the Match" hardly feels like a rough draft. But frankly, the emotional center of this film (the bond between a mother and the daughter whose trip east filled her with abandoner's guilt) is actually a screenwriter's dream.
Most documentaries tell a story using journalism and various insights as the main ingredients for drama. One can better imagine "Blessed Is the Match" as a fictionalized historical melodrama. The film's emotional texture primarily comes from the use of the mother's and daughter's vivid writings.
This shouldn't come as news to Grossman, since the last third of her movie reenacts Senesh's stay at the same Gestapo prison as her mother. The most amazing details of Senesh's life (her sudden military training and torturous internment) have little archival visual corollary as rich as Hannah's and Catherine's writing, so Grossman and the screenwriter, Sophie Sartain, are forced to imagine the most moving moments. Re-creations also fill in other gaps.
This all provides a practical solution to a structural dilemma, but, as reenactments tend to do, you're forced to wonder whether Senesh's story is best served by a documentary. Of course, it's only because the documentary makes such a deep impression that you are left wanting a movie as big as the story Grossman tells.
Wesley Morris can be reached at wmorris@globe.com. For more on movies, go to www.boston.com/ae/movienation. 
