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User's review
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[ATTENTION: This review reveals content of the movie.]
This film exploits the power of ambiguity to provide a disturbing representation of post-war German angst in the generation that follows Hitler. A young man unexpectedly discovers that he has been dragged into a moral vortex that should have been closed to him, consequent to his intimate relationship with an older woman. Because ambiguity is so central to the text, the production well tolerates narrative gaps and incomplete character development -- indeed, they provide the conditions that help us also feel that it is impossible for the reader to "read" that most important text -- the moral character of his lover. Of course, there are allusions to this indecipherability early in the film, during moments of tension between the lovers, when Michael reveals his inability to understand her and know her feelings. But it is not until long after she leaves him; later, when he learns of her earlier life as a Nazi guard, that the enigma of Hannah Schmidt arises in full measure. It is a difference that Michael cannot fathom, and no one else seems capable of understanding her either, not the professor and certainly not the judges in the court. Neither do we as an audience -- we only know that she loves reading and that she is illiterate, and even these facts are unavaialble to any character other than Michael. He also knows both her tenderness and her desire and he knows that he loved her. Consequently he is torn between a compulsion to decipher her actions and a fear of what any answer might do to him. This leaves his relationship with her in a state of limbo till the end, making his own life an unfinished story that cannot be completed, can only be passed on. How to understand a Nazi guard who later cries over the last lines of Homer, who takes offense at the explicitness of Lawrence, who finds tears in the presence of a children's choir? -- this is the question that torments his lover, but it also left for us to consider. Of course, there is no final answer, but a hint of one arises in the middle of the film, when another law student says that there were six women on trial for their actions at Auschwitz, yet there were 8,000 people working at Auschwitz -- these six only being tried by virtue of a witness who wrote a book. For if 8,000 people were there, and 8000 people were guilty (in that camp alone), then the question is no longer properly addressed at the actions of Hannah Schmidt; it is rather a question that we must be address to each and every one of us.
10/10
4.2.2009 -
com2013@ - age: 13-17
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