Dir. Bille Eltringham, Hungary / UK, 2007, 103 mins
Cast: Catherine Tate, Iain Glen, Heike Makatsch, Jessica Barden
Review by Carol Allen
Don't be misled by the presence of Catherine Tate into thinking she will be doing one of her broad comedy characters. As well as being the star of her own sketch show, Tate has another career as a straight actress and her role here as Mrs Ratcliffe is more drama than comedy.
The time is 1968. Fervent communist Frank (Glen), head of the local party in Bingley, Yorkshire , announces to his wife Dorothy (Tate), his two children - art student Alex (Brittany Ashworth) and eleven year old Mary (Barden) - and Dorothy's brother Philip (Nigel Betts) that they are moving to the promised land of East Germany, where he has been offered a job as an English teacher. They are allocated a flat in a grim, run down apartment block, but Frank's naïve enthusiasm for the communist ideal remains undimmed, while Mary, who adores her father, takes to life as a young Pioneer as to the manner born, even allowing herself to be recruited by their scarily glamorous liaison officer Fraulein Unger (Heike Makatsh) into becoming a junior informer for the Stasi. As the realities of the Stalinist lifestyle, with its stifling bureaucracy and culture of fear, make themselves apparent, Mrs Ratcliffe begins to rebel. First, she accidentally assists a young man in making his escape to the West, then she lays her own plans to get her family out of the country, with the help of their eccentric and feisty one-legged neighbour, Anna (Katharina Thalbach), who will do anything for hard cash.
It's a good story, based on the real life experience of English teacher Brian Norris. The film's makers, though, seem unsure as to whether they are making a comedy or a drama and it sometimes falls rather uneasily between the two genres. It also dithers about who is the main character - young Mary, whose diary entries provide an inconsistent voice-over narrative for some of the time, or her mother, who eventually takes over the film as she changes from submissive housewife to revolutionary dissident. Being told from an English perspective there's also a rather uncomfortable whiff of anti-communist propaganda, as compared, say, to The Lives of Others, which tackled life in the DDR from an insider point of view.
Tate, however, acquits herself well, while Glen is endearingly and dangerously naïve as Frank, who doesn't realise what his own wife is made of let alone Stalinism, and Barden as Mary is a young talent worth keeping an eye on. There's also a sweetly comic romance between Anna and Philip, who elects to stay with his sweetheart, while the rest of the family plan their escape. One wonders though what sort of a hiding they will get from the authorities, when they realise the rest of the birds have flown.
|
