It is 1958 in Germany and Hanna Schmitz (Kate Winslet) discovers a fifteen-year-old schoolboy throwing up outside her home. She charitably cleans him up and helps him back home to his family.
The boy is Michael Berg (David Kross), he turns out to have scarlet fever, and is bedridden for three months. Once he is well again, he returns to visit Hanna with a bunch of flowers to thank her. Hanna is a bit offhand about his gratitude and even starts to take a bath in his presence. Michael runs away in embarrassment.
Eventually Michael decides to return, presumably just to catch her in the bath but this time, after a bit of a mishap, it is he who needs the bath and Hanna duly supplies one. Seeing him in the bath gets her thinking. She decides she fancies a bit of that as a thank you and gets her own kit off. In this manner, Michael begins a passionate affair with a mysterious woman more than twice his age.
Hanna tells him that she likes being read to and he discovers that if he reads literature to her, Hanna will be passionately grateful in return. The 'kid', as she calls him, treats her to 'The Odyssey', 'Huckleberry Finn' and 'The Lady with the Little Dog' among others and in return she treats him... to... well plenty.
All the time, Hanna is remote and uncommunicative. He learns little about her, although he does asks her name as early as the third shag, pushy or what. Other than that, she doesn't offer anything to him, other than herself. It is clear she is using Michael, in more ways than one, but he is enjoying it immensely and finds himself hopelessly in love with her. This causes friction at home and with his schoolmates where he passes up on a girl called Sophie, who appears eager for him to read to her.
Hanna works as a glum conductor on the trams but when she is offered promotion to an office job, she disappears and Michael is heartbroken. The story moves on eight years. Michael is now studying law and his class attend a war crimes trial. Which is a pretty cool field trip to have.
He is stunned to see Hanna across the courtroom, standing as a defendant in the trial. Talk about someone popping the bubble of your first love. He learns that his former lover was an SS guard during the war and she is on trial with five other women for allowing several hundred prisoners to burn to death inside a church. The trial traumatises Michael, he has never gotten over his love for Hanna, and now he is guilt ridden for having fallen for her.
He also realises that what he knows about Hanna might influence the trial. He discusses this with his teacher but these conversations aren't elaborated on, which is a shame. In the end, Michael holds his silence and so condemns Hanna to a lifetime in jail. It also begs the question as to what Hanna's lawyer was playing at. Didn't do his research very well, did he?
The film portrays Hanna as a simple person, used to taking orders, someone just doing her job. Hanna herself seem to understand little of what she was accused of and was prepared to take the wrap for the others rather than experience a little embarrassment because of her own inadequacies.
Michael never felt able to visit Hanna in jail, but as a way of erasing some of his guilt he records himself reading the same books he read to her during their love affair and sends them to her in prison. Michael is now played by Ralph Fiennes, whose glum demeanour makes Hanna look positively cheerful. It is such a change from the lively young Michael played by David Kross. Michael now comes across as a weak man, unable to get his head around the two sides of the woman he knew.
As her release draws near, he finally visits her, now played by a cosmetically aged Winslet. However he is as distant to her as she was at first to him, if not more so and he basically condemns Hanna a second time. This time she takes her own life.
At the end of the film, Michael travels to the flat of a Jewish woman who was one of the survivors and wrote a book about it. Her book was used in evidence at the trial. It is Hanna's dying wish that her few savings went to her. Michael makes an embarrassing bodge of dealing with this. What did he hope to achieve? Somehow, he appeared to think he might be welcome.
It’s a good film, full of interesting ideas, but suffers from an uninspiring execution of these idea. There are too many questions, not enough answers. This was surely the intention but it is unsatisfying. The key element of the story became clear to me early on. It may even have been a better film had it been made obvious at the start and therefore elaborated on. I also like a bit of controversy in my films but I'm afraid, on that front, this was a letdown too.
Winslet is good but in trying to play Hanna as moody but comes across as a bit wooden and she's better than that. Perhaps, in trying to push for an Oscar she's pushed too hard. Fiennes part is more of a supporting role, at times it is unnecessary, and undoes a lot of the good work done by David Kross, who is excellent.
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