These days you enter a three and a half hour film screening with a certain trepidation. You half expect to discover that Trump has nuked Copenhagen and invaded France while you were in the cinema. At the time of writing neither of those things have happened yet.

 László Tóth, the film’s central character, is played by Adrien Brody who, to my ears, did a decent job of carrying off a Hungarian accent as he played a Bauhaus trained architect who managed to get to the United States shortly after the end of WW2. The scene of jubilation when the migrants saw the Statue of Liberty has a darkly ironic tone today. Tóth is a lightly fictionalised version of the Hungarian architect Marcel Breuer who moved to the US in 1937. Much of the film’s ideological thrust would have been lost if that had been part of the plot.

At a fairly early, point the soundtrack has an old recording of a Zionist announcing the creation of Eretz Israel in 1947 and telling listeners that all necessary measures will be taken to establish the state. Given what we know about what happened next, this was the expulsion and mass murder of the Palestinian population. From a dramatic point of view, it was very incongruous. Tóth is Jewish and occasionally attends a synagogue but he is mainly devoted to heroin, whiskey and pornography.

In old westerns the Native Americans either appeared as brutes determined to kill the white coloniser or didn’t feature at all. In this work director Brady Corbet takes the latter approach to the Palestinians and develops it to a ludicrous extent. Zsófia, Tóth’s niece, emerges from what seems to have been elective muteness and announces that she is going to move to Jerusalem with her husband. This she argues is her duty despite the fact she seems to have had a decent enough life in the US and had managed to get out of Stalinist Hungary where she’s been born.

Mrs Tóth was born a Hungarian Catholic and converted to Judaism for love. After various ups and downs she tries to persuade hubby to move to Jerusalem because it is “home”. At no point in any of this does anyone remark that Jerusalem is home for lots of people who weren’t born European Catholics.

No self-consciously arty film is complete without an epilogue. In this one Tóth is guest of honour at a fancy shindig in Venice. He’s in a wheelchair and broken by strokes. Zsófia gives a little speech about what a great chap he his and says “he would say to me as a struggling young mother during our first years in Jerusalem, “no matter what the others try and sell you, it is the destination, not the journey.” You can imagine Ben Gvir and Netanyahu cheering that scene.

A load of other stuff happens too, but for me, whatever merits the film may have had were completely undone by its abuse of the Holocaust to make the case that Palestinians should pay the price in blood and land for the crimes committed against European Jews by other Europeans. You walk out feeling that you devoted half a day to propaganda masquerading as high art.