Love Gets a Room (Spanish: El amor en su lugar) is a 2021 English language Spanish-British musical historical drama film directed by Rodrigo Cortés and starring Clara Rugaard, Ferdia Walsh-Peelo, Mark Ryder and Henry Goodman.
Set in the Warsaw ghetto during World War II, the story focuses on a group of Jewish thespians performing a Yiddish musical stage play. A love triangle develops among them, and dreams to escape the ghetto face a harsh reality.
This film provides examples of the following tropes:
- Cluster F-Bomb: Stefcia lets out multiple "Fuck!" in rapid succession at one point.
- Evil Is Petty: At the beginning, a Nazi soldier toys with people in the ghetto, pointing his rifle at them, mocking them and forcing them to laugh.
- The Famine: There's a famine in the ghetto, as the Nazis deliberately closed it off to let the Jewish people inside die of hunger.
- Mark of Shame: The Jews of the ghetto have to wear white armbands with a blue Star of David when going outside (the equivalent of the Yellow Star, the latter of which had to be sewn on clothes outside of Poland at the time).
- The Musical Musical: A musical film about Warsaw ghetto Jews performing a stage musical.
- Opening Scroll: There's a text at the start of the film.Warsaw, January of 1942.
400,000 Jews from all over Poland have spent more than one year confined by the Nazis in a narrow ghetto in the middle of the city. No one can enter or leave its perimeter.
Outside the wall, life goes on. Inside, its inhabitants die of illness, hunger, the cold.
Or they try to remember that they are still alive. - Regional Riff: Given the subject and populations it concerns, it's no surprise that the soundtrack is made of a good chunk of klezmer-sounding music, with much fiddling and clarinet.
- Show Within a Show: The stage play the troupe performs.
- Tagline: "The ghetto is no place for love stories."
- Take That!: The first and second plays/musicals seen in the film have lyrics mocking Les Collaborateurs (the Jewish Police
, to be specific). - Translation Convention: Everyone speaks in English whereas they should be speaking Yiddish, Polish or German (though there's actual German when the soldiers shout, naturally).