Anne Frank, la mia migliore amica

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.

The movie has Anne Frank in the title, but it stars a different person. A friend of hers, who has her own journey and her own struggles ... and her own problems to survive. That being said, that should not deter you from watching this.

Nor the fact that it switches from good times to a harsh reality - which makes viewing this quite the hard task to say the least. Just when you see the girls/friends happy, you get taken away from that and shown concentration camps or other horrible things that (mainly) Jews had to endure back then.

Watching this - one can only hope that comparisons that are being made right now, are going to stop. I do not want to get too political, but when there is a pandemic, you should not compare yourself to people that were actually hunted and had to die for no reason at all - and not being able or having a choice in the matter.

But the movie was not made to be compared to nowadays. It was made to show how cruel or rather how horrible of a time it was back then ... and in that the movie succeeds.

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.

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.

An interesting portrayal of Anne Franks best friend Hannah Goslar and their relationship as teenage girls growing up in Nazi occupied Amsterdam.

I thought they portrayed Anne is a slightly annoying brat who at one point emotionally tormented Hannah by ignoring her.

However I thought the idea of showing Hannah's story was a powerful and fresh point of view to what million of Jews horribly endured during World War Two.

Not a classic but still a very sad story.