The Shop on Main Street is one of the rare films that examines its historical subject without 20/20 vision, accepting history as something always in flux and that even forces as defiantly evil as the Nazis were not always recognized as the threat that we now know they are. Jan Kadar and Elmar Klos tell the simply story of a poor man and an elderly woman, living through the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia. Tono is making only enough money to feed him and his wife when he is appointed the Aryan comptroller of the elderly, near-deaf Mrs. Lautmann’s button shop. Due to her almost constant state of confusion, several Jews in the community have provided for her without her knowledge. They convince Tono to pretend to be her assistant while actually running the store. From that point on, Kadar and Klos develop their sweet, often comical relationship as the Nazis grip on the town slowly tightens.

Much of the focus remains on Tono’s struggle to balance his protection of Mrs. Lautmann with pleasing his money-hungry wife. Situations that are at first amusing take on a deeper meaning and importance once the danger of Tono’s situation is made apparent. The film becomes increasingly insular and the shop itself becomes something of a reprieve from the suffocating presence of Nazis – a place where Tono slowly witnesses the monument being built in the town square and eventually many of his friends being sent away. This transition is realized beautifully, allowing the horrors that we’ve seen in so many films to take a back seat to the tragic relationship of their central characters and their inability to come to terms with the inhumanity that seeks to destroy them. Where you would expect the scope to broaden to explore the effects on the entire town, it hones in almost uncomfortably close on Tono’s moral struggle and attempts to make sense of madness surrounding him. The final act becomes almost surreal in its clear division between the shop and everything surrounding it, reaching the breaking point when the two can no longer ignore or escape the impending doom. But Kadar and Klos do not leave us with an image of despair, rather one of almost naïve humanity and hopefulness – a final for peace in the face of horrifying evil.