The Book Thief

Another Sunday, another "costume drama", this time about the horrors visited upon ordinary German folk in the run up to WW2.

I have a complaint to make - in this day and age of gripping foreign dramas such as The Bridge, Borgen, Inspector Montalbano and the rest, it seems a bit old hat to have a serious film set in Germany, with German characters and German, indeed Nazi, themes, all speaking in English with cod German accents that could have come straight from 'Allo 'Allo. It was even worse than that - certain German words and phrases (eg "nein") were used all the time, and the background chatter was all in German. To me, it made it silly - one of the reasons why "Downfall" was such a fantastic film was that it was spoken entirely in German.

Anyway, moans aside, it was a good film, a good story and was beautifully filmed. The small town scenery and ordinariness of the characters gave the film a very atmospheric feeling of impending and actual evil. This worked very well when the SS searched the basements to find ones suitable as an air raid shelter - but we were worried that the hideaway Jew, Max, would be found. It also worked well when the SS arrived to take away a long time resident who was just discovered to be Jewish, and conversely, it worked well to show the sheer dread when they were huddled in the shelter and the allied air raid was in full swing.

I think the film was basically a fairy tale. It meandered along - the heroine is a young girl given to foster parents as her mother was arrested by the Nazis as a communist. The foster patents take in and hide a Jewish fugitive as part of a debt of honour, and the girl steals books for him from the town's mayor. Great tragedy awaits the family in a bombing raid, but - like as if - she meets Max after the war, they get married and she becomes a famous author as a result of the books she read.

I think this is a good effective portrayal of life in Nazi Germany. There is nothing new, nothing that hasn't been said many times before, but it is done in an atmospheric and chilling way, amidst beautiful scenery - and lots and lots of snow!

02/03/14