The Reader
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Years ago, when I first came upon The Reader, I had a feeling of déjà vu before even setting eyes on the book. The Nazis, again! But this story is actually about the most powerful human emotions - love, shame and guilt - and speaks to our brains more than our hearts.
I entered the cinema with some trepidation. I really didn’t want to see this book - a hit in Germany despite Nazi fatigue - ruined by Hollywood aspirations (and with Kate Winslet and Ralph Fiennes). People seemed to like the slight confusion the story left with them, and I too felt an annoyed bewilderment about right and wrong, cause and effect, judgement and responsibility. And about how little we still know about getting it right.
The story is relatively straightforward. A 16 year-old boy's life hugely impacted by his first relationship with an older woman - who, after teaching him about sex, disappears - just when he starts to feel some love for her. He shows his love by reading to her, and is rewarded by her sexually, without romantic notions or even infatuation getting in the way at first.
Her disappearance is caused by a promotion to an office job that requires literacy - and we start to understand she is illiterate. We see the distress of her young lover, who henceforth, is unable to form lasting relationships. In a touching scene with his teenage daughter, he admits he cannot be open - a failing that has cost him his marriage, and his relationship with his parents.
He discovers that his lover was a guard at a concentration camp when he is a law student attending her trial by chance. This is handled so delicately, it's a true work of art. Kate Winslet wonderfully shows the simplicity of this woman's mind without patronising her - and thus shows us how difficult it is to decide on guilt. We start to wonder how her cruel actions were possible and why. We feel the shame she has about her illiteracy, and begin to empathise with the 'monster'.
The story reminds me of another German book, written shortly after the war, by the Nobel Prize winner Heinrich Boell, where a women actually dies from her feelings of shame. I don’t remember ever seeing the pernicious role of that subconscious emotion explored so elegantly before in film - all actors delivering it with sincere, believable honesty.
The stark ending is also delicately, almost lovingly done, producing a thought-provoking film about human relationships and their consequences.
- The Southbank Gourmande
The story is relatively straightforward. A 16 year-old boy's life hugely impacted by his first relationship with an older woman - who, after teaching him about sex, disappears - just when he starts to feel some love for her. He shows his love by reading to her, and is rewarded by her sexually, without romantic notions or even infatuation getting in the way at first.
Her disappearance is caused by a promotion to an office job that requires literacy - and we start to understand she is illiterate. We see the distress of her young lover, who henceforth, is unable to form lasting relationships. In a touching scene with his teenage daughter, he admits he cannot be open - a failing that has cost him his marriage, and his relationship with his parents.
He discovers that his lover was a guard at a concentration camp when he is a law student attending her trial by chance. This is handled so delicately, it's a true work of art. Kate Winslet wonderfully shows the simplicity of this woman's mind without patronising her - and thus shows us how difficult it is to decide on guilt. We start to wonder how her cruel actions were possible and why. We feel the shame she has about her illiteracy, and begin to empathise with the 'monster'.
The story reminds me of another German book, written shortly after the war, by the Nobel Prize winner Heinrich Boell, where a women actually dies from her feelings of shame. I don’t remember ever seeing the pernicious role of that subconscious emotion explored so elegantly before in film - all actors delivering it with sincere, believable honesty.
The stark ending is also delicately, almost lovingly done, producing a thought-provoking film about human relationships and their consequences.
- The Southbank Gourmande
