Anne Frank, ma meilleure amie

In her world-wide famous diary ,Anne Frank adressed to an imaginary friend she called Kitty ; in real life ,she had a true friend Hannah; the film depicts the deeply moving story of their friendship, which ,in spite of Anne's death ,survived ;"she's still my best friend " says Hannah,still alive in 2022 at 93.

Alternating scenes in occupied Netherlands and in the concentration camp ,the movie is never boring,as an user wrote .Although they came from well-to-do families ,chiefly Anne, they suffered the same humiliations as their coreligionists : the infamous yellow star (which was not the Nazi's invention:in the thirteenth century ,French king Louis IX aka Saint louis forced the Jews to wear the "rouelle "(a badge with a small wheel on it) ,the places forbidden to the Jews, the brutality and the contempt of the German soldiers ("it stinks over here") , the Jews were hardly allowed to breathe ;someone wrote that the movie was too nice : the way the Nazi officer treats the pregnant woman,nice? The propaganda movies telling the Dutch they were betrayed by their allies and deprived of their dairy products ? The soldiers forcing their way into the houses ,at any time of day or night?

And still, in this nightmarish world,hope against hope did survive ;Anna would dream of Hollywood , she would be famous ;A Florence Nightingale 's admirer ,Hannah wanted to be a nurse. In the end, both had their vow..

Anne Frank meant as much as her own family to Hannah ;when the former disappeared , she did believe that her friend had fled to Switzerland where she was skiing .This makes their brief reunion all the more poignant .Meeting your dearest friend in hell ,is there something worse?

Both actresses give restrained moving performance :Aiko Beemsterboer 's ressemblance between her and her character are striking ,much more than Millie Perkins' in George Stevens' version (1959)The rapport she has with her co-star Josephine Arendsen gives the movie its outstanding emotional strength.

Hanneli and Anne are best friends in Amsterdam, together with another small bunch of teenage girls. Unfortunately, they are Jews and are vilified on a daily basis by the Nazis. Still, they try to enjoy themselves, thinking about boys and trying to escape reality. If their daily life is not happy in 1942, worse is yet to come.

Apart from the lack of suspense, because everybody knows what happened to Anne and it's clear that Hanneli survived since she's telling the story, the big issue with this narrative is that you never really get to know Hanneli and Anne comes across as a big teaser and a silly teenage, obsessed with boys. Surely, Frank was not a saint and this should not be a hagiography, but the level of silliness and teasing is laid down too thick.

It doesn't help that the timeline shifts back and forward continuously, between the last happy days in Amsterdam and life in Bergen-Belsen and it helps even less watching the movie in the English version. Hanneli parents speak German to her and between then and she answers in English (Dutch in the original) so one may wonder what's going on in that family. There is no explanation about the fact that they were Germans escaping the persecution and Hanneli herself should have been speaking German.

More mess in the concentration camp, where a Hungarian woman's spoken part is not translated or subtitled, so you end up following a "dialogue" with Hanneli speaking English, someone answering in German, and someone else in Hungarian.

The movie was really good..... for what I could understand. I wish at the very least the subtitles were on and correct. Three were moments when there wasn't voice over or subtitles so guessing by body language you may figure it out. If you want to reach a wider audience I suggest at the very least have subtitles. Kind of frustrating.

Interesting to see a film based around the life of Anne Frank , but not solely all about her and for a change Anne is not portrayed as a complete angel.

However it's a film worth watching alone for the performance of Josephine Arendsen who was superb as Hannah Goslar.

I took it as a nice surprise that they showed a different point of view than most of Anne's films. Here she is more sassy, she acts more playfully, ignoring the fact that something very bad is happening in her town, she wanted to have fun, have jokes, kiss boys (and maybe girls?) was a good point. What was missing was the budget to work better in some scenes. And I feel that the actresses had too little experience to show the full vividness of what it was like to be a teenager in 1942.