Dir. Stephen Daldry, US/Germany, 2008, 124 mins
Cast: Kate Winslet, Ralph Fiennes, David Kross
Review by Carol Allen
German writer Bernard Schlink's novel, on which this is based, tells a story which touches many raw nerves - those of the post-war generation of Germans and the guilt they inherited from their parents for the country's Nazi past, the victims of the Holocaust and the rest of the world with its condemnation of the monstrous barbarism that was enacted in Nazi Germany.
As a fifteen year old boy in the late fifties Michael (as a boy played by Kross, and as an adult by Fiennes) is taken ill the street and is rescued by Hanna (Winslet) a woman twice his age. When he returns to her shabby apartment to thank her, she seduces him. Despite the difference in their ages, a love affair develops between the inexperienced boy and the sensual though often grumpy and careworn older woman. Apart from making love, she demands that he read to her, and she sits enthralled while he initiates her into the Greek and Latin classics and the stories of Chekhov. Then one day Hanna inexplicably disappears. Several years later Michael, now a law student, is taken by his tutor to witness a trial of Nazi war criminals, women who were concentration camp guards. One of them is Hanna. As he observes the trial, struggling to reconcile this revelation with the woman has loved, he realises that Hanna had another secret, which he could use to help her, but such is his horror of her past that it is only years later, as an adult, that he is able to can act on it in a limited way.
It is a difficult story to tell but Daldry's direction and David Hare's screenplay, which moves back and forth from the young Michael to the locked in and damaged adult he has become, handle it with skill and delicacy. Winslet is first class in a role very different from any she has played before. Apart from the sensuality of the love scenes, which are explicit but discreet, and her thirsty delight in being read to, there is little joy or charm in the character. In Hanna she shows us how an unsophisticated and ignorant woman could be led into monstrous actions and never understand or appreciate the enormity of what she has become. The thrust of the film is the effect on Michael of being brought face to face in this most personal way with his country's past and how that fact causes him to stand by and not help his former lover - an oblique analogy perhaps with the previous generation that stood by and did nothing to help. But one also feels pity if not sympathy for Hanna. Fiennes is good in the more limited role of the adult Michael, while Kross, who was only eighteen when the film was completed (filming of the love scenes was held up until after his eighteenth birthday) gives an astonishingly touching and mature performance. There are good supporting performances from Ganz as Michael's law tutor Professor Rohl, who tells him in relation to the trial that everyone in Germany knew what was going on - leading one with the unanswered question as to what part did he play in the war years as a young man? - and from Lena Olin as the Holocaust survivor, who writes the book which precipitates Hanna's trial.
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