Borrowing, not stealing

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27 February

This is a review of The Book Thief (2013)

Once it threw off its Harry-Potterish feel (same composer), The Book Thief (2013) grew into an interesting and engaging story.
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) February 27, 2014

John Williams famously gave us Hedwig’s theme, but he also scored The Book Thief (2013), and, at the opening, it almost seemed like The Hogwarts Express, snorting its way through snowy countryside, that we saw and felt. Airy solo flute, floating solo clarinet, and the ensemble as the whole, did not seem best intended for Germany of the time, for it felt a little too safe (although, in the screening, not everyone would have been conscious that the mood of the music seemed an uneasy fit), even as we made our way down one of its carriages, and – under the direction of the narrator – wondered : whose life was going to be affected ?

If it had not been for that urbane, Sorting-Hat type of delivery, the narration in The Book Thief (2013) would have been fine...
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) February 27, 2014

Perhaps, by this means, too, we wanted to be distanced from a brother’s death and burial in a foreign land, and reminded of the context of everyone’s mortality, and so do not resist being cocooned from the worst of the Nazi regime until, as maybe those in Germany did we were embedded in it*. Wrongly, arguably, Roberto Benigni was criticized for bringing humour to a father’s treatment of the horror of life in a concentration camp in Life is Beautiful (La vita è bella) (1997), but it is a more obvious example of what this film does.

For we are bedding ourselves down with the domestic arrangements of Liesel’s new home, Hans (Geoffrey Rush) welcoming, and Rosa (Emily Watson) decidedly ungemütlich, for quite a while, and even having the shock of having the camera draw back whilst the choir that she is in sings of how it will not be friends with the Jew.

Geoffrey Rush impressed from the start in The Book Thief, whereas Emily Watson had to hold back into growing into husband and wife.
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) February 27, 2014

Liesel’s (Sophie Nélisse’s) friend Rudy Steiner (Nico Liersch) provokes more than paternal condemnation with his desire to be another Jesse Owens, but it is with Kristallnacht that the outrage of the Nazi reign comes to the fore, with its consequences for Liesel’s family. Then the full love of both Hans and Rosa come out, and the film focuses tightly on the things that matter : love, friendship, and trust. From that core of values comes all that follows, and, whilst we see just and unjust fall alike, it also shows the good done from following one’s convictions.

There are a few quibbles with the world that we are shown and hear, but they are minor ones**. Otherwise, the film may feel a little overlong, partly because of the time until the story proper begins. However, it catches all the emotion that has built up in its course and brings it out from the tensions of betrayal, feared discovery, the accidents of war, and renewed beginnings, not just speaking to a younger audience, but to those with a more mature appreciation of the background.

It is testament to the film, and no doubt to Markus Zusak’s novel, that it can stand alongside a more bloody account of the effects of the war in Lore (2012) and, not seeming in its shadow, be a complementary account of a youngster in the midst of it.

@THEAGENTAPSLEY Either way, TBT is just more sanitised because they needed the 12A. Also drove them to focus more on the central r/ships.

— Sarah Parkin (@SarahParkin1) March 10, 2014

Post-script

Robbie Collin, writing a review in The Daily Telegraph, decided to be very rude about the film - is he right ?


End-notes

* Even then, it must be said that, probably seeking a certificate such as 12A, the ferocity and frenzy of Kristallnacht are underplayed.

** It probably reminds us that we are in Germany, to have (after some initial German with subtitles) English spoken with a German inflection, but it seems curious never to have no or yes, always ja or nein, and the Bürgermeister, in which he is not alone, just sounds British, e.g. when he says What is the meaning of this ?.

Also, with language, the idea of the dictionary on the walls lets us overlook the fact that these words are in English, but it seems to go too far to show Liesel finding the word ‘jellyfish’ in a text that is obviously in English, when we know that it is meant to be in German. And, finally, in proportion to the size of the school, either because period locations were scarce or it is a set and not an extensive one, the town does not have the feel of one that could fill it.


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Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)

The road to wherever

This is a review of Lore (2012)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

28 February

This is a review of Lore (2012)

* Contains spoilers *

Lore (2012) is a film that, along the way of the journeys that we see made, shares beliefs current at the time of the fall of The Third Reich. In the case of Lore's family, neither parent is an ordinary German citizen, because he is a high-ranking SS officer and she appears implicated in unethical medical experimentation, and Lore is in the Hitlerjugend: occasional near-religious fervency for Hitler, and a disbelief in the American reports and evidence of atrocity, are the stuff of utterance in these times, when the idea that Holocaust denial could be legislated against seems impossible.

The film is not those beliefs or utterances, but they are an integral part of the travel that is encompassed from the Schwarzwald, in the far south-west, to the Baltic north of Hamburg to an island akin to, but not, Föhr, where we leave Lore. (Not before, as elsewhere, a tactile quality in the rich mud has been experienced, and the otherness of crossing by causeway to this island has vividly been shown.)

Lore, as the eldest of five, has been put in charge of getting her brothers and sisters up to the North because her mother, having denounced her husband to him as a Feigling (coward) proudly strides off to deliver herself to the forces of occupation - one of the first striking moments for Lore is when, having raced after her mother and caught her up, she finds her mother already so resigned to what she is doing that she appears to have nothing to spare for Lore and the family after those parting instructions.

What follows is the journey, the confrontation with death, brutality and violence, and it is almost all the time just the passage of the five siblings, plus Thomas when he joins their number and (and as long as) makes himself useful. Director / co-screenwriter Cate Shortland and Saskia Rosendahl as Lore brilliantly show her teetering at the edge of whether she should associate with Thomas, as an assumed Jew, or feel sexually excited by him and his touch, just as, in her fascination for the various corpses, she challenges upbringing that she should not have curiosity, and should not harm others or steal.

This fractured sense of belonging in and relating to a world that is no longer the same Germany, but even split into three zones that they have to negotiate, is there in the cinematography of the characters, with part of a face here, maybe not in focus, a focus that varies through the shot to lead to a disjunction, or a conflict between the scene and the figure in it. By contrast, the sensual, even visceral, quality of nature is fed into every frame in which it alone features, in panorama and in close detail, touches reminiscent of great masters such as Tarkovsky, but with more of a sense of urgency, though none less of integration into the narrative.

The film shows a quest, and we have to decide - as does Lore - why, for what, and what matters, because all that she knew before and trusted now seems unreliable. What does happen next matters less than that Lore has made this journey and unlearnt much in the process. Getting to where we must leave her, having been allowed to be part of that transformation (although we always knew that we stood outside it), we leave her as herself, as Lore


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