awillawill

This film had the potential to be one of the great ones if only someone had displayed the nous and courage to slash about 20 minutes from the first half.

As I watched the film at home I kept shouting. "Okay, guys, we've got the message, now move along to the next step in the story." But my shouts were in total vain and there came several points in the first half where I came within a whisker of giving up on it and finding something else more enjoyable to watch. It wasn't until we got to the first cafe scene that the story began to take off -- as take of it most certainly did.

Perhaps the problem for the director and the editors lay in the fact that much of it was a single, protracted shot. But they should have seen the need to delete some of the more repetitive sections.

Sadly this hugely amusing television series produced in Australia by Britain's Caroline Aherne was not given the promotion and recognition it deserved. Like all good comedy, characters were beautifully observed and touching. We thought it was consistently even funnier than The Royale Family, made by the BBC in Britain. Television channels should give it a second chance by running it again.

The astonishing thing about anything performed, written or produced by Aherne is that it is full of surprises. Who would have thought the repeated scenes in which Joe lovingly smooths down a piece of timber would be funny, but it most certainly was.

This is a great story, but dumbed down and splattered with dialogue and images that were a nonsense. The young actor playing the Nazi commandant's son Bruno indeed showed tremendous talent, but why was he asked to speak like an adult, rather than an eight-year-old? It was so unnecessary; so counter-productive. And how come that Shmuel, the Jewish kid in the concentration camp, was fatter than Bruno? How come the servant from the concentration camp looked better fed than the Nazi family? How come there was just a single, poorly constructed, non-electrified fence where Bruno and Shmuel met? How come there were never any guards patrolling the perimeter fence? How come in wartime did the commandant's wife have access to a seemingly endless supply of designer clothes? (And to nit-pick, where did Bruno get a modern-day, zip-up shirt?) And so the questions could go on. Not least how and why we are expected to believe how easy it would have been to penetrate the fence as the film moves towards its conclusion.

To be fair, the acting was mostly excellent, though I'd loved to have seen it made in German rather than English. And I am immensely relieved – and a little surprised – that there was no cop-out with the ending. But as for the rest… Oh dear.

Movies often require the suspension of disbelief – never more so than in, say, the James Bond flicks – but to undermine such a serious, important, compelling story with a contemptuous approach to so many realities was seriously disappointing. Shame on you, BBC Films. Shame on you, Miramax. Shame on you, writer-director Mark Herman.