The plot: When news reaches them that their son has died on
the front line, German couple Otto (Brendan Gleeson) and Anna Quangel (Emma
Thompson) begin to feel disillusioned with the Third Reich. Wanting to voice
protest, but knowing full well what the consequences of that would be, Otto
decides to rebel in a different way. He starts writing postcards, detailing how
the Nazi regime doesn’t have their best interests at heart, and leaves them all
over the city of Berlin. However, once police detector Escherich (Daniel Brühl)
starts to find them and senses a pattern developing, Otto and Anna will have to
think fast if they want to keep spreading their message to the people.
Everyone in the cast functions under the same low-key style
of performance. Some of them do really well with it, while others end up
falling behind. Gleeson does nicely with his bubbling-under-the-surface want
for justice and change in his home, while Thompson ends up being too passive
for that same sense to get across. Brühl ends up making a nice change of pace
from the usual antagonists of these kind of stories, playing a detective who is
more drawn to solving the mystery than who the solution would end up assisting.
Monique Chaumette as Frau Rosenthal, an old Jewish woman who lives in the
Quangel’s building, easily gets that sense of quiet rage and despair out the
most of the entire cast. Katrin Pollitt as the local courier Eva Kluge brings some
warmth to the proceedings, and Lars Rudolph as an apolitical scavenger leaves a
surprising impression (surprising in that, despite his limited screen time, I
actually remember that he was in it).
It’s genuinely depressing that a film like this, a period
drama set in Nazi-ruled Germany, would feel timely
in this day and age. And yet, with the influx of Nazi theology nowadays with it
even cropping up here in my neck of the woods (a little too close to my neck of
the woods, but that’s a rant for another day), that’s the effect we get. It
goes the same route as Downfall in how it shows the Third Reich not exactly as
this soul-crushingly oppressive and nigh-fantastical regime, but as something
that has been normalized and treated as just a normal part of their society.
Also like Downfall, this approach ends up making the reality of the setting
even more terrifying. Right from the opening scene, with Anna and Otto’s son
fighting and dying on the front line, we get a sense of how dehumanizing and
demagogic that ideology is in practice, as well as the effect it leaves on
everyone involved. Because of this, it feels like any action that could
undermine it, even something small, is what needs to be done.
Propaganda seems to have gone a similar route to ideas like
postmodernism, irony and feminism… namely, that the word has become so overused
that most people have lost contact with what it actually means. The term
‘propaganda’ is something that fits in with what we think of in terms of Nazi
ideology: Information, usually fabricated, that exists solely to enforce ideas
and behaviours in the masses. However, what comparisons like that end up doing
is ignoring that the definition of propaganda is a lot broader than that. Boiled down to its bare essentials, propaganda is just information that
promotes a specific political point-of-view. Dig deep enough and you’ll see
that a lot of media, including almost everything I’ve reviewed on this blog,
would fall under the umbrella of propaganda for some form of political mindset.
I bring all this up because this film ends up highlighting the more positive
side of such things. It acknowledges that this specific form of rebellion and
dispersal of information is rather small, but that’s what happens with certain
ideas. All it takes is for the idea to be out in the world before it starts to
grow within the human mind. For some, it grows into another example of the
problem that a given regime exists to get rid of, while for others, it becomes
a sign that whatever feelings they have that go against the teachings of the
regime are worth holding onto.
However, this is where the intersection of political
rebellion and the need for secrecy starts to chip away at the film’s positives.
I said before that everyone here acts as if they have something to hide, keeping
to hushed tones because of that, and while that keeps with the tone of the
narrative, it also saps away at the engagement value of the overall film. As
good as some of these actors are in that mode, the fact that everyone exists within that mode makes
the film feel monotonous at times.
There’s also how the Quangels’ actions end
up affecting their environment… which is to say that we don’t end up seeing
much of the impact. The most we get is seeing Escherich reacting to the fact
that the postcards exist at all, never giving us a glimpse at whether they are
making any changes. Admittedly, that is part of the point, with Otto in
particular doing this because he feels he has
to get the truth out of his system rather than just suppressing it within
himself, but it would’ve helped if we got any idea that his actions had that
impact. Especially since one of the main sources of tension within the film is
whether or not Otto and Anna will be caught for their insubordination; hard to
feel tense about actions where we can’t tell if they are actually doing
anything worthwhile in the first place.
All in all, this is a decent film with a rather poignant
statement to make, highlighting how rebellion against an unjust system, no
matter how minor said rebellion turns out to be, is to be celebrated. However,
between the pacing, the hit-or-miss acting and the tonal monotony, its merits
are tougher to fully appreciate than they should be.
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