The Reader

The Reader is not a feel-good movie. It is a little disturbing and extremely thought-provoking – at the same time as being quite watchable, engaging and well acted. This is the film for which Kate Winslet won the Actor for best oscress, or something like that, of which you r no doubt aware and if u r interested in perusing her autobiography and discovering that she made her debut at 11 years old dancing beside a honey covered cereal and-so-forth go to http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000701/bio .... most interesting indeed.
The Reader is a film that deals with emotional alienation and with the aftermath of the holocaust. It left me feeling troubled and needing to understand why people did the stuff they did during that black period in history.... whether they were total psychopaths taking pleasure in their cruelty or if some of them were deeply troubled and emotionally alienated individuals with a current of deeply repressed and intense emotions running below the regime of conscious thought – that would have rebelled against the atrocities their minds condoned...... or if all of them were merely pretty ordinary people within a very authoritarian culture who were“just following orders”..... whether the holocaust was the result of the evil of individuals, or the collective evil of a society. These are the questions raised by this film, but it is not done in a self-conscious or pedantic way – the story simply tells itself and it is a good story and a compelling one to view. Because the film begins with a love affair and the connection with the holocaust emerges later on, by the time that happens you have already begun to empathise with Hannah Schmitz, the character played by Kate Winslet (or rather to empathise with the young boy who is in love with her) – this is deeply troubling because one does not expect to come upon a “Nazi war criminal” from such a very human angle. There is a mitigating circumstance in this woman's life which led to her enlisting in the SS and on two occasions leaving a job as soon as she is offered promotion, I didn't get this fully when I was watching the film so it may be helpful to know from the outset that she is completely illiterate and goes to great lengths to avoid admitting that she is unable to write. This is really the key theme, the very human theme which the love story, such as it is, hinges on. Basically she saw not being able to read as a greater shame than murder. Ouch!
A sense of emotional alienation is implicit in the way she relates to the young boy she has the affair with. The relationship borders on being abusive because he is so very young. The love scenes between them add to this sense of alienation because they are rather functional and lack intimacy. I am sure this was intentional, but it does remind me rather of the kind of “film-sex” that has been invented by the film industry – the kind in which “the jumping part” is top of the agenda and absolutely no kind of foreplay of any sort ever ever happens. (As far as I can ascertain, this is what most male sexual fantasies consist of, so perhaps this has been a product of a male-dominated film industry!) Often film-sex is also followed by people jumping out of bed and pulling on their pants straight over their cheesy underparts (or underparts that would be rawther sticky & cheesy in real life, o yuk how filthy) – it's a lack of realism that always makes me feel slightly squeamish and scream out, “please, please just have a quick shower before you go!!!” That is another good thing about The Reader – it involves a great deal of bathing, both before, after and during the performance of the obligatory film-sex. Another kind of bathing I experienced was having my mind somewhat drenched in the gut-squirming dilemmas involved in post-holocaustian German guilt. I felt troubled for quite a few days after watching the phillem. It is based on a book written by a German gentleman who was a legal eagle or beagle of some sort and the book is supposedly vauguely autobiographical – you can fill in the gaps left by my atroh-shus memory by going to the links below.

http://blog.goethe.de/current-writing/index.php?/archives/P2.html

http://www.smh.com.au/news/entertainment/books/its-a-simplistic-idea-that-only-monsters-can-commit-monstrouscrimes/2009/01/24/1232471657778.html?page=fullpage