Film (2012)
Directed by Cate Shortland
Screenplay by Cate Shortland and Robin Mukherjee
Based on the novel by Rachel Seiffert
Kendall Square Cinema
Cambridge, MA
With Saskia Rosendahl (Lore), Nele Trebs (Liesel), André Frid (Günther), Mika Seidel (Jürgen), Kai Malina (Thomas), Nick Holaschke (Peter), Ursina Lardi (Mutti), Hans-Jochen Wagner (Vati)
in “Lore”
Photo: Music Box Films
Lore is the oldest child of five of a German SS officer. It is the end of the Second World War in Germany, and the parents are taken into Allied custody, leaving Lore in charge of the four younger children. Under dire circumstances, she is forced to lead the group of them on an embattled odyssey to their grandparents’ house far away. They encounter a young man who carries a Jewish identification card; despite the differences between them, he helps them. Things are grim, and, to say the least, difficult for everyone. Along the way, inevitably, they learn something about what happened during the war.
This oddly done, impressionistic view of the trials of this group of children tries to convey the turbulence and unsettledness of the time through the eyes of a Nazi’s adolescent child. Yet, its style is so self-consciously not articulated that we come away with an ache, but not much more.
Much time and attention is paid to photographic shots of character and environment that are clearly meant to set a mood. This unending embellishment with captured scenery, at the expense of storytelling and character development, contributes to an overall feeling of meandering and confusion. Indeed, the time and setting were confusing and disorienting, but that could be conveyed by a film that is not itself confusing.
This strangely oblique take on a Holocaust film conveys something about the awakenings of conscience, but does so awkwardly. Its tone is dreary, understandably, but so pervasively that it is hard to take in. Also brought into the mix of guilt and conscience is the theme of sexual attraction and violation, but, also, so unaccompanied by narrative, that its conflicts and tensions do not make the most sense.
The film succeeds, to some extent, in conveying a feeling of disorientation and lostness at the end of the war, but itself is so all over the place that it is less effective than it otherwise might be.
– BADMan
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