ALONE IN BERLIN
DIRECTOR: Vincent Perez
CAST: Emma Thompson, Daniel Bruhl, Brendan Gleeson, Mikael Persbrandt
CLASSIFICATION: 10-12 PG V
RUNNING TIME: 103 minutes
RATING: 3 stars (out of 5)
THERESA SMITH
A SLOW-BURN, melancholic drama, Alone in Berlin is a very by-the-numbers kind of film. Its old-fashioned, straightforward approach to storytelling sits at odds with its coldly clinical, modern-day cinematography.
The sets and locations are pristine, not just because things are not covered in grime but because, when compared to the usual sweeping, golden-light patina of movies set in World War 2, this one is very crisp. Having the characters speak with German accents is irritatingly distracting – letting them talk in their own accents would have been preferable if German speaking actors weren’t going to be used.
The actual story is taken from Hans Fallada’s novel, Every Man Dies Alone, one of the first anti-Nazi books to be published in Germany after the war. The book was about a true-life husband and wife who became part of the German Resistance and were eventually caught, tried and executed.
The film gathers a stellar cast, starting with Emma Thompson and Brendan Gleeson as the working-class couple, Anna and Hans Quangel, whose son has been killed on the warfront. Gleeson does a beautiful job of portraying the quietly stoic husband, while Thompson masterfully uses micro-expressions and little movements to portray a range of emotions, from fear to resignation.
As Otto points out, the war effort has taken his son, what else does he have to give? And from that point on, he quietly begins to rebel, painstakingly writing out postcards denouncing the Nazis and the war, and leaving them in public places. Despite knowing it would count as treason, Anna joins Otto in his quiet resistance and the two walk a fine line for about a year.
A policeman tasked with catching the author of the “seditious” postcards eventually tracks him down accidentally, rather than through the denouncement in the book, which spells the end of the couple. Another thing the novel does well, which the film somehow manages to miss, is create the suspicious atmosphere of fear that prevailed in Berlin at the time, when impressions were enough to get one arrested.
Instead of terror, what prevails is a depressed air and we never really get a sense of what is going on in the mind of the policeman – the one person who actually collects and reads all the postcards – with Daniel Bruhl making for a patently under-utilised actor. Like the couple suppressing their anger, the film just keeps emotions pressed down.While the story suggests thriller, the pace is too glacial for that and, on the dramatic side, we just never get under the skin of the broader population.
While the film is a carefully packaged dig at collective German national guilt – it shows that the German people weren’t all sheep, and also how difficult it was for people to point out that they didn’t agree with the overriding political agenda – the original story has been so Hollywood-ised that any themes of moral and political complexity have become lost in the blandness.
If you liked Defiance or Valkyrie, you will like this.