Kross and the rumpled, professionally weary Mr. And certainly there are things to recommend here, notably the affecting Mr. There’s no surprise, of course, in a Hollywood movie designed for adult audiences (and for the awards season) featuring attractive lighting, seductive stars and glossy production values. Even Michael’s visit to an extermination camp is beautifully lighted. Winslet’s pale skin creamy, to the immaculate production design (Brigitte Broch). ![]() Not that the film dwells on barbarism: beauty is its currency, from the cinematography (by Chris Menges and Roger Deakins) that makes Ms. Outrageously, Hanna is a victim too, because she took the guard job only to hide her illiteracy, as if illiteracy were an excuse for barbarism. Schlink writes that “the pain I went through because of my love for Hanna was, in a way, the fate of my generation, a German fate.” In the novel and the film which monumentalizes every trembling lip and fluttering eyelash, turning human gestures into Kodak moments Michael’s pain turns him not just into Hanna’s victim, but also a kind of survivor. Ralph Fiennes plays the hero of the story, grown up into a discontented lawyer. Eventually a Holocaust survivor (Lena Olin) living in a swank Manhattan apartment delivers a stern lecture to Michael about exploiting the Holocaust, an admonition that arrives too late for this fatuous film. During the proceedings he comes to realize her secret, her shame, which has nothing to do with her being a Nazi prison guard: she’s illiterate. One day a professor (Bruno Ganz) takes him and a few other students to a court where some women are being tried for Nazi war crimes, which is how Hanna re-enters Michael’s life. In time the lovers separate, and the story skips to the 1960s, with Michael wearing sideburns and attending law school. A discreet affair ensues, characterized by shots of decorously writhing flesh, tears, smiles, shouts and literature: Michael reads aloud to Hanna. He does and, not long after, inside a flat lined with hanging nylons and clutter, she orders the boy out of his clothes and into the tub, before opening a towel and her legs to him. Winslet) materializes, as if from nowhere, briskly cleans the mess and tells him to follow her. The young Michael rushes into the rainy streets and retches inside a building vestibule. The first flashback occurs shortly after the doleful opener, with Michael staring out a window at a passing train, an image that transports him to 1958, where his 15-year-old self (David Kross) sits hunched inside a streetcar in obvious pain. Both turn out to be true, as the nominal reasons for Michael’s pained smile are excavated through fluid flashbacks and somber revelations. Daldry has no fear when it comes to embracing stereotypes about chilly Germans. ![]() (He makes the woman breakfast, but stands at an awkward remove when she leaves.) From the cool, sleek surfaces of his carefully appointed apartment and the downward curve of his mouth, it appears that Michael either lives an ordered if unhappy life or that Mr. Fiennes as a lawyer, Michael Berg, bidding an uncomfortable goodbye to an apparent one-night stand. ![]() This, at any rate, is what the film would have us believe it’s about, though mostly it involves Kate Winslet, her taut belly and limbs gleaming under the caressing light, deflowering a very surprised-looking teenage boy who grows up to become a depressed-looking Ralph Fiennes.ĭirected by Stephen Daldry and fussily adapted by David Hare from a slender novel by the German author Bernhard Schlink, the story opens in 1995 Germany with Mr. It is also, more obliquely, about the Holocaust and the generation of Germans who came of age after that catastrophe. “The Reader” is a scrupulously tasteful more on that word tasteful later film about an erotic affair that turns to love.
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