& a blog

if the reader were an alcohol, it would have one of those painful, complex tastes. something that burns as it goes down, and sobers as much as it intoxicates.

the film is complex in that sense that it’s hard to know what particularly one should be considering amongst the emotional wreckage the film quickly unleashes upon the its viewer. the film opens with an establishing shot of ralph fiennes, who is busy being german and introspective, while a young woman who has slept over makes her way of his home. the colors of the projection set the mood: pale, drained, overexposed. looking up in this pale palatte, fiennes observes a train passing, and is suddenly transitioned into the color-saturated vision of his youth. these transitions, between the pale, pained exposures of the present, and the colorful past, continue throughout the film, and they serve to further shape the viewer’s sense of doom and foreboding. because things are not ok in the ‘contemporary’ end, we are left tense with the fear of when percisely the color of the past will drain into the tortuous pain of the future.

when that moment comes, we strangely don’t see it coming. we have perfectly brought along with our protagonist into a future whose shape we can’t quite discern. i will make a small note of the way it plays out: he is in a room with many people, a serious yet busy occassion, he looks up, and is destroyed by the gravity of his entire youth and the source of much of its happiniess. it is undone.

and then, there’s only tension in the question of recuperation and reconciliation. what can be done to move on?

in case one couldn’t tell, the reader, and its story are an allegory for the experience of post-war germany. hannah schmidt (played masterfully by kate winslett) is an example of the much discussed trummerfraun, or women of the rubble. these women, representing two-thirds of Germany’s post-war population, were vital, potent women who helped dig Germany out of its post-war depression, by taking up all sorts of jobs previously reserved for men. in the exploration of this theme, the reader invites comparison with the marriage of maria braun which also considers the trummerfraun as a site of narrativic focus and emotional conflict.

as the reader considers post-war germany, it wonders at how much the post-war german youth must be hostage to their past. in a clear metaphorical nod to this, we first meet our protagonist when he is very sick. he is young, and innocent, but needs to be helped by the same personage of germany he must overcome (schmidt). he is torn then, by the love he develops for her kindness, and the ultimate understanding of what she was. we are left then to wonder if her actions of kindness in the future can ever make up for the cruelty hidden in her secret past.

there are few twists which further torture us about hannah schmidt. once convicted, for instance, she lives in prison with no particular problems. until her “kid” asks if she is sorry for what she was imprisoned for. she explains that she’s never thought about it much.

until to that day.

and after their meeting, despite the promise that she will now be freed and put back into the world, she kills herself. and leaves behind only a message to give her money to the people she hurt.

this brings us to what i would consider the film’s punctum. ralph fiennes, in confronting the jewish survivor of the terrible event hannah was associated with, must confront the victims of his own heritage, and seems to be on some sort of religious pilgrimage to her posh new york townhouse.

but the survivor won’t grant any absolutions. even to ralph fiennes, who is not the perpetrator, nor a contemporary of the crime. he is merely a pawn in the pained history that seems to have no agency. why then, i wonder, is the survivor so cold to him, and how does this reflect a subtelty of the post-war german experience? how collective does the national shame really need to be?

i hope these are the questions that the reader forces us to ask. particularly, as i’ve read that the germans are sick of movies about the holocaust and films like the reader. which is the great latent theme of the reader itself, as ralph fiennes first presents to the viewer when he looks up at the subway car overhead in the establishing scene of the film. is this ever going to end? he seems to ask with his eyes. and then the answer, articulated by the film’s conclusion: yes.

tell the story to end it.