Starring Yuliya Vysotskaya. In French, German, and Russian, with English subtitles. Rating unavailable

Famed Russian director An­drey Konchalovskiy was born in 1937 and is one of the last living directors still able to depict the Second World War from personal memory. (John Boorman is another.) Along with extensive work alongside Andrei Tarkovsky and his own brother Nikita Mikhalkov, Konchalovskiy has done genre pieces in the U.S., including Shy People and Tango and Cash, as well as tackling the Soviet era in 1991’s wonderful The Inner Circle, with Tom Hulce as Stalin’s private film projectionist.

In Paradise, the versatile writer-director returns to the macro-micro approach to history, with minor players interacting with major forces at the height of the Holocaust. He does it with a kind of retro-experimental edge, shooting the whole thing in atmospheric, misty-toned black and white, in the old-school 4:3 ratio, complete with the scratches and jumps that Stalin must have put up with. (Cinematographer Aleksandr Simonov deserves serious kudos here, as do the actors.)

The form is even stranger, with three participants facing the camera and candidly, or self-servingly, telling their own stories. These are Olga (Yuliya Vysotskaya), a former Russian aristocrat caught sheltering Jewish children in occupied Paris; Jules (Philippe Duquesne), the French cop and Gestapo collaborator who interrogates her; and Helmut (Christian Clauss), a high SS officer of noble background and romantic beliefs who also knew Olga before the war, and meets her again when he’s assigned to a concentration camp where she’s being held.

They tell their versions while dressed in clean white pyjamas of a sort, in a location that could be a postwar detention centre or perhaps a waiting room to heaven or hell. These long soliloquies are intercut with their actions, which—in scenes that move forward and back in time—include Jules pushing Olga to trade sex for better treatment and, much later, Helmut packing up his Prussian mansion and figuring out how to high-tail it to Paraguay.

These distancing devices drain some of the horror from the tale, although they also make a few sudden outbursts of violence more shocking. At 130 minutes, the deconstructive qualities of the movie—named after the “German paradise on earth” that Hitler promised his war would create—may prove wearing or even rather dull for some viewers. I found it an absorbing, if challenging, exploration of memories that are fading fast.