BEFORE: I'm sticking around in Germany one more day, but moving from Berlin to Hamburg and back several decades to World War II. I know, I said I wasn't going to mention the war, because the Germans don't like to talk about it. I mentioned it once yesterday, but I THINK I got away with it. (That's for all you "Fawlty Towers" fans out there.) Well, the gloves are coming off tonight, as romance and war become the new "peanut butter and chocolate". Seriously, WHO walks down the street eating out of an open jar of peanut butter? Nobody I know. Old TV commercials LIE.
This is only possible, of course, because acclaimed German actress Keira Knightley carries over from "Berlin, I Love You".
THE PLOT: A British colonel and his wife are assigned to live in Hamburg during the post-World War II reconstruction, but tensions arise with the German who previously owned the house.
AFTER: As I've said several times in the last few weeks, movies would be very boring without love triangles, wouldn't they? Hey, at least Keira's character is getting some in this film, she was in one of those non-romantic stories in "Berlin, I Love You", where she played a social worker who stole an Arab kid. This time she plays Rachael, the wife of a British army colonel who basically steals a German's house because they need to live somewhere while they're cleaning up Hamburg after a bombing and winning a war. Because when you win a war, you get to live in the loser's houses (apparently) but only after they take down all their Hitler portraits. Let this be a lesson to the people in both Russia and Ukraine right now - it's very important to come out on the winning side, because if your side loses, you can't own a house any more.
The house is a really nice one, and Mr. Stephen Lubert and his daughter are SUPPOSED to go live in a refugee camp, because it's his dead wife who had all the money, so the rules of community property no longer apply, and so he can't own a house. WTF? Isn't it enough that the Allies kicked their asses, what kind of weird rules were being put on the Germans after the war? It's Hitler who stole all that valuable art, Lubert was just some guy, he wasn't even a member of the Nazi Party? Or is that JUST the kind of thing that a member of the Nazi Party would say? The Colonel feels bad about kicking the man out of his own house, so he suggests that Lubert and his daughter stay in the house, only they have to live in the attic, I guess it's what's known as a "reverse Anne Frank", that'll teach him a lesson! Seriously, though, in a house that beautifully furnished, I'm supposed to believe that the attic looks like a total dump? Why, it's practically wuthering up there, it looks so dank and drafty!
So the Colonel's always working, and he leaves his wife (who, it turns out, is still grieving over their dead son) alone in the house with a more attractive and possibly Nazi man. What could POSSIBLY go wrong? And this same sort of thing happened in "Mudbound", is Jason Clarke just typecast as the type of husband who's likely to get cheated on? I guess once you take one role like that, maybe it's all that Hollywood offers you. Let's see, he's got a dead wife, she's got a dead son, they both like classical music and ordering the servants around, so yeah, they've got some things in common. The Colonel really should have seen this coming, but to be fair, he's been pretty busy, and ignoring his wife has sort of become second nature at this point.
I've got to really hand it to this one, they didn't just create a love triangle, they created perhaps the ULTIMATE love triangle, where she's a Brit and he's a Nazi and they're forced to share a house without driving each other crazy. I know this was technically based on a novel, but it seems to share a number of plot elements with that little-seen 1980's German sit-com "That's Our Nazi". To make matters worse, Lubert's daughter starts skipping school in order to go work at the bombing sites to recover bodies - because, why wouldn't she? - and this gets her into smoking cigarettes, drinking with other kids and also having sex with the remnants of the Hitler youth Resistance. Let's just say she's at that difficult age where teens want to rebel.
Rachael passes her time by getting back into playing the piano and watching Lubert chop wood, so it's not long before the Colonel has to go away for a week and do, umm, army stuff, so yeah, stuff's gonna happen back at the house. Lubert and Rachael start knocking jack-boots, doing the Nazi Nasty, "machen das Tier mit zwei Rücken", if you catch my drift. And the Colonel was only gone SIX DAYS, but maybe that was six days too long. Then once he comes back, unexpectedly, it's a wonder that the story didn't fall back on him catching them in bed together. BUT, now Rachael has to make a decision, because her husband's been re-assigned back to a London post, and also Lubert's been cleared to leave Hamburg, he can go chop down some trees build that little Swiss chalet in the woods with a view of the mountains that he's been dreaming about. This is going to lead to an awkward conversation, for sure.
Meanwhile, though, remember the Hitler resistance? (it's called Werwolf here, only they're not actual werewolves, very confusing.) Lubert's daughter's been fooling around too, and her pillow talk was all about the man who stole her father's house. She also stole that cigarette case with pictures of the Colonel in it, so her boyfriend wants to do the right thing and take the Colonel out - so it seems like this might be one way to resolve the love triangle, right? What's a little assassination between friends? Ah, that would be an easy way out of this corner that the writer painted themself into, wouldn't it?
Honestly, it's a toss-up over which man should end up with Rachael, they really went out of their way here to make this a difficult choice. (Does this mean there were "very fine people on both sides"?) There's so much flip-flopping done by Rachael, how could either man accept her after all that? I'll admit, though, that I was more interested in who gets that beautiful house, and that remained, quite noticeably, unresolved. Hey, relationships come and go, but real estate is permanent.
Also starring Alexander Skarsgard (last seen in "Godzilla vs. Kong"), Jason Clarke (last seen in "Mudbound"), Fionn O'Shea, Kate Phillips, Martin Compston (last seen in "Filth"), Alexander Scheer (last seen in "Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales"), Anna Katharina Schimrigk, Jack Laskey, Rosa Enskat, Frederick Preston (last seen in "The Zookeeper's Wife"), Flora Thiemann, Jannik Schümann (last seen in "Monster Hunter"), Henry Pettigrew (last seen in "The Danish Girl"), Tom Bell, Joseph Arkley, Abigail Rice, Naomi Frederick, Ivan Shvedoff, Pip Torrens (last seen in "Effie Gray").
RATING: 5 out of 10 concentration camp photos
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