3.5 stars (out of 5)
Co-writer/co-producer/director Giulio Ricciarelli’s German-language drama isn’t quite as powerful as something like the Oscar-winning Hungarian production Son Of Saul (Saul Fia), but this is less about life in the Nazi concentration camps during World War 2 and more a study of justice and the crucial need to remember. Or, perhaps, as we like to call it, the need to not forget.
Drawn, to a point, from the life of Fritz Bauer, this takes place in 1958, 13 years after the war and 12 years after the end of the Nuremberg trials, and junior public prosecutor Johann Radmann (Alexander Fehling) is shown as an idealistic young man hoping to move beyond small cases. When Radmann happens upon documents that identify some local figures as having served in Auschwitz, and journalist Thomas Gnielka (André Szymanski) recognises a teacher who was in fact the commander there, the pair joins forces to initiate a trial against many former members of the SS.
The horrors of the past weigh heavily upon Radmann, affecting his relationship with seamstress Marlene (Friederike Becht) as he pores through mountains of paperwork, but what’s perhaps most important here isn’t the dangerous conspiracy of silence that has led to so many having escaped prosecution: it’s the fact that so many Germans (and not just the youthful, ignorant types) now choose not to know what happened.
Offering strong playing, fine period detail and a cautious tone, Ricciarelli’s digging-up-the-past piece is on one level obviously and specifically about the Third Reich, and yet this is also, should you care to see it that way, a movie all about NOW, and how so many of us keep on not remembering – and not caring.
I Wake Up Screening 