Allemagne mère blafarde

This was probably one of the few foreign films I couldn't sit through. Talk about dreary. This must have been one of those films which helped establish the boring-foreign film stereotype. While the story was very strong and the pacing was excellent, it feels like a long, drawn out version of people waiting to commit suicide. However, the acting in the film was amazing, fully delving into the uneasy silences of two people who are torn apart by war and different views of marriage. Tough to inhale at most times, but a perfect example of the tragedy.

Germany, Pale Mother is a unrelentingly bleak film, made all the more so by the fact that it is a semi-autobiographical portrait of Helma Sanders-Brahms parents. The film covers about a decade or so in their lives, from newlyweds in Hitler's Germany to the reconstruction post- German era.

We first hear of Lene before we see her. Hans, and his friend Ulrich, spot her walking along the bank as they are boating along a river. Despite the fact that Hans finds her attractive he watches impassively as a dog belonging to some Nazi party members attack her, but is most impressed by the fact that she doesn't scream or flinch. They later attend a dance together and Lene asks him if he's a member of the Nazi party, something that's important to her, though she seems fairly apolitical and doesn't have strong feelings about the Nazis, even when she watches them haul off one of her Jewish neighbours. Lene and Hans marry and are quite happy together, but the happiness is short lived. Since he's a low level civil servant, who isn't even a member of the party he is quickly conscripted into the army to go fight in Poland, the first in several professional setbacks he will face as a result of not joining the Nazis. Things are great for Lene either. Though the early years of the war mostly involve waiting around for her husband to come home from leave and ignoring the fact that more and more Jewish families are being hauled off, the evil of the war will come and visit her much later.

I've often heard it said that in the most personal stories we find universal truths and this certainly is true in this film. Sanders-Brahms settles her point of view almost exclusively on her mother and her parents' marriage and yet it manages to cover so much, from the way in which Germans, even non-Nazis, ended up participating in the war through their willingness to look the other way, to the way in which Nazi corruption continued after the war. By focusing on her mother, Sanders-Brahms also turns some conventional wisdoms on their head. While the men were off fighting abroad, Lene has a difficult life, but she manages to get along, become independent, taking care of herself and her child. Some of the worst things that happen to her happen during "peace" and reconstruction, times when the men who are supposed to protect her betray her in horrible ways.

Eva Mattes, as Lene, has by far the showiest role and she is pretty fantastic in it. The real star though is Sanders-Brahms direction. There are so many bold choices, from using herself as a voice-over, splicing in documentary footage of a little boy being interviewed so that it looks as if he is having a conversation with Lene, a shot of the swastika reflected in a pool of water, which are haunting and poignant.

This movie reminded me of a caricature by Sempé: a crowd leaving a cinema, an utterly depressed look on all their faces. Seeing this, a young man cueing at the box office says to his girl friend: "wow, this must be a really good movie!".

"Deutschland, bleiche Mutter" is a very bleak movie, more interesting as a document of the generation born around the war years than of the war years themselves. If that's what you're looking for, you have struck gold. Otherwise be warned, it is not a movie for the easily depressed (or easily bored, for that matter).

The movie is very nice shows the struggle of a German woman throughout the world war 2 and post the world war2,very heart touching screenplay done by all the actor and actress.

I had been wanting to watch this for quite a few years. The director, Helma Sanders-Brahms, was born in Germany in 1940, and is credited as both writer and director. So I'm surmising that, if not directly autobiography, this is drawing on the early life of some specific woman of approximately her age. The very last scene, intensely personal and very harrowing (to me), is surely taken from someone's life story.

Further suggesting that this is autobiography, the narration is given from the "I" perspective of the adult who had been the young girl, here born in 1942-43 in Germany. But everywhere I look people describe it as "semi-autobiographical", whatever that means.

As (auto)biography, it's rather lacking in narrative completeness, or a recognisable overall narrative trajectory, but to me that makes it more compelling if anything: this does have the appearance of scenes from someone's mother's life.

The people in it, such as the mother, Lene, played by Eva Mattes, are flawed and damaged, and also come across as helpless victims swept up in a tide of an impossibly tragic and epic period in history which is always there in the background as something unpredictable, incomprehensible and monolithic, a bit like the weather.

It's difficult or impossible to know whether Sanders-Brahms is trying to say "this is what a war like this does to people", or whether it's primarily "about" the sadness and trials which a dysfunctional family imposes on small children.

However, the film starts with a recitation, lasting quite some time, of the angry poem of the same name by Bertolt Brecht, written in the fateful year 1933. The flavour of that poem might be given by the final verse:

"O Germany, pale mother!

How have your sons arrayed you That you sit among the peoples A thing of scorn and fear!"

For that reason, if for no other, there's no doubt an idea of conflating of the mythic with the personal: maybe in some ways Lene *is* Germany of that period.