La petite prairie aux bouleaux

1955: Alain Resnais, at the request of the Second World War History Committee, visited the places where thousands of men, women and children lost their lives. These are Orianenbourg, Auschwitz, Dachau, Ravensbruck, Belsen, Neuengamme, Struthof. With the help of archival documents, he retraced the slow ordeal of the deportees. The crowds were deeply upset but these pictures, it has remained standard reference work.

Half a century later, a former deportee (wonderful Anouk Aimée) comes back to the place of her suffering; she knows that, as a survivor, it's a tribute to pay to the thousands who were exterminated ;it 's all the more important to her since she feels guilt about one of her mates whom,she tells us , she could have saved .Her wandering along this tracks overgrown with grass is filmed with a great sense of decency :no flashback is needed , when your memories come back to haunt you.

The meeting with the young man (August Diehl,who speaks very good French and thus is not dubbed ) is pivotal ;he too feels guilt,and for a good reason ; the heroine's first reaction is disgust ,but eventually she realizes that ,for him,too , it's an exorcism of sorts. What the point of carrying on with hate after all those years ?

An embarrassing moment : Claire Maurier's tatooed number on her arm mistaken for her phone number .Not funny ,let alone witty .

But this slow-moving movie should be seen.

An Auschwitz-Birkenau survivor returns to the camp sixty-years later. The story follows her visit, her reactions, her mood swings.

Documentary or fiction? Marceline Loridan-Ivens--herself a death camp survivor--directs a harrowing autobiographical story in which the fictional blends with the environment, and memories of the past are still very vivid, not through flashbacks, but through the viewer's own imagination. Filmed at Auschwitz-Birkenau, the film is a touching performance by Anouk Aimée. Her reactions (she had not prepared the part but let herself react to the situations) are disturbing, but in a positive way. As Myriam confronts the ghosts of her past, she is caught between her will to remember, and her will to forget, navigating to and fro fron reason to near-insanity. The variations of her mood are contrasted to the stability of Oskar (remarkably well played by August Diehl), a young German photographer, grandson of an SS.

Disturbing, harrowing, and painful at times, "La Petite Prairie aux Bouleaux" (The Birch Tree Meadow, or Birkenau in German) is a touching film. Through its simplicity, it manages to deal with a delicate subject with concern and honesty.

Please note Jeanne Moreau's contribution in the writing team, and also Zbigniew Zamachowski's appearance as Gutek.

Really outstanding, gripping movie - excellent in every way. I rarely give 10s or 1s, but this is definitely a 10.

The movie opens with an Auschwitz Survivor's Association meeting, a sort of "class reunion" type gathering where people are joking and reminiscing, etc. Quickly, the tone changes when wounds are opened and one woman returns to the scene of the crime, to relive it in her mind. She unexpectedly meets a young German man who is photographing the place, making an archaological record of it. He meets her and wants to join her trip down memory lane. It gets more and more interesting, with a great deal of psychological complexity throughout.

The only thing I would change is the ending. I won't say what happens, but she needed to remember the letter. It would have been better punctuated, as a story. Beautiful cinematography, writing, acting, the whole bit. Outstanding!