★ 6 / 10
This story of real characters is told via
CinemaSerf
This story of real characters is told via two timelines. The more menacing tells us that Hilde (Liv Lisa Fries) has been apprehended by the Nazis and…
This story of real characters is told via two timelines. The more menacing tells us that Hilde (Liv Lisa Fries) has been apprehended by the Nazis and imprisoned for assisting her husband Hans (Johannes Hegemann) as he worked for a free Germany in wartime Berlin. The second thread shows us their summer of love. We meet them, and their friends, and follow their love affair through to their wedding and their conceiving the child that she is now doomed to bear in custody. Luckily, despite a fairly terrifying start to her incarceration and the process of her childbirth, Hilde - hitherto a dental nurse - manages to get along with her warder Miss Kühn (Lisa Wagner) and gradually befriend her and ensure that she is permitted to nurture her new born boy. With these two storylines gradually intertwining, we learn that the brutality of their government was not reserved for their foreign enemies, and that any rebellious instincts from their own citizens were robustly dealt with. Fries delivers really quite strongly here, but perhaps because of the way the story unfolds there is really a distinct lack of threat throughout, and I missed that. Indeed, the whole film has a bit of the television drama look to it that I felt fell a bit flat as it progressed. Perhaps it is just assuming that those watching already know how ghastly and toxic the regime was, but the film rather undercooks that element and as such this does struggle to sustain the sense of peril that she must have faced. It’s naturally photographed with their bucolic existence powerfully contrasted with their imprisonment and the narration, sourced from letters, does provide an authenticity to their struggle. This is a good looking piece of cinema, but dramatically it does come up a bit short.
Read full review
★ 7 / 10
Humanity overplayed?
Yili-zhu-125-540994
The film tells a story of a group of young, reasonably well off and naive people, who fought the NAZI by trying to help USSR. However, as said by Hilde's son…
The film tells a story of a group of young, reasonably well off and naive people, who fought the NAZI by trying to help USSR. However, as said by Hilde's son Hans, a German historian, after the war, many Nazi officers who participated in the torture and killing of those fighters were never prosecuted but joined the West German military, while his parents and other continued to be treated as traitors till 2008. That makes you wonder whether they were heroes fighting for freedom, or victims in the geopolitical conflicts played by the people in power.In the film, all of the people in Nazi machines, the secret police , the prison guards, the hospital staff, the judges, were humane, kind and sympathetic. I am not sure how well this reflects the historical truth. Prison systems across the world were cruel in those days. Was Hilde just lucky to be treated humanely, or was it the filmmaker's desire of not hurting this beautiful soul, on the big screen?Looking at the conflicts today that are killing so many people in the name of glorious goals, I wonder whether humans are really capable of learning. This film tells such a story that makes some of us think and see the wars differently.
Read full review
★ 8 / 10
Liv Lisa FRIES in a German Period Movie by Andreas DRESEN
ZeddaZogenau
BERLINALE 2024: Nomination for the Golden BearA calmly told film about Hilde Coppi (1909 - 1943), who was sentenced to death by the National Socialists as a…
BERLINALE 2024: Nomination for the Golden BearA calmly told film about Hilde Coppi (1909 - 1943), who was sentenced to death by the National Socialists as a member of the communist resistance group ROTE KAPELLE. Liv Lisa FRIES, the superstar from the German quality series BABYLON BERLIN, plays this extraordinary role with calm precision.The German director Andreas DRESEN has been making very successful films that deal with Germany's past and present for 25 years. DRESEN has already been nominated twice for the EUROPEAN FILM AWARD (2002 for HALBE TREPPE / 2008 for WOLKE NEUN).Partly in flashbacks (with wonderful images of the Müggelsee in summer), the story of the married couple Hans (Johannes HEGEMANN) and Hilde Coppi, who offered modest resistance to the Nazi regime through a communist-minded circle of friends, is impressively told. Both were sentenced to death in the merciless dictatorship. Their son Hans Coppi Junior was born while they were still in prison, and his voice can be heard at the end of the film as an 80-year-old man.This film is a monument to the Coppis and their circle of friends that is worth seeing. Other roles include wonderful German actors such as Lisa WAGNER as a prison guard who is gradually becoming capable of compassion, Alexander SCHEER (EUROPEAN FILM AWARD 2019: nomination for GUNDERMANN) as a sensitive priest and Florian LUKAS (known from the German quality series WEISSENSEE) as a nasty prison doctor.Well worth seeing!
Read full review
79%
TOMATOMETER
· 19 reviews
79%
AUDIENCE
7.0/10
1.7K
