The Reader is an exemplary piece of filmmaking, superbly acted by Kate Winslet, David Kross and Ralph Fiennes, beautifully lit by two of Britain's finest cinematographers (Roger Deakins and Chris Menges) and sensitively directed by Stephen Daldry from a screenplay by David Hare. In certain ways they sharpen Bernard Schlink's bestselling German novel of 1995 which deals with a subject - Nazi concentration camps and the Holocaust - that has hung over my generation since the outbreak of war in 1939, days after my sixth birthday.
In 1940, we were made aware of the camps satirically by Chaplin's The Great Dictator, and sombrely by the Boulting brothers' film about the incarceration of the anti-Nazi cleric Martin Niemöller, Pastor Hall. Five years later newsreel from Belsen and Buchenwald showed us what went on inside those camps.
Since then, there has been an unending stream of Holocaust movies (nearly 300 are dealt with in the third edition of Indelible Shadows: Film and the Holocaust, Annette Insdorf's standard work on the subject), ranging in character and quality from scrupulous documentaries like Claude Lanzmann's Shoah and Alain Resnais's Night and Fog to, for me personally, the two most offensive, Liliana Cavani's near-pornographic The Night Porter and Roberto Benigni's sickly Oscar-winning Life is Beautiful.
Ralph Fiennes made an unforgettable impression as Amon Goeth, the demonic commandant of the Plaszow forced labour camp in Schindler's List, the most widely shown movie on the Holocaust. So a provocative statement of some sort is being made by casting him as Michael Berg, the innocent narrator of The Reader. Born in Neustadt, Germany in 1944, the gifted son of a liberal intellectual, Berg is a successful lawyer who reviews his troubled life from the perspective of 1995 Berlin, and it's immediately clear that his experiences have left him secretive, inward-looking, emotionally stunted in a way that recalls the form and moral tenor of the Losey-Pinter film of The Go-Between.
The movie is in three sections, with a couple of codas. In the first chapter, set in 1958, the 15-year-old Michael (David Kross) meets the voluptuous Hanna Schmitz (Kate Winslet), a kindly tram conductress more than twice his age. She provides his sexual initiation and sentimental education in the manner of such celebrated Continental novels as Raymond Radiguet's Le Diable au corps. In return she asks him to read to her before and after sex, and he regales her with The Odyssey, Huckleberry Finn, War and Peace and (a book she thinks disgusting) Lady Chatterley's Lover. The eroticism of reading brings to mind Michel Deville's La Lectrice, and the lovers' activities at their trysts complement each other.
If you left the film after 45 minutes at the point when Hanna mysteriously disappears from Michael's life, and were unacquainted with the novel, you'd have thought it a wistful rite of passage, rather like Summer of '42 or The Graduate. But there are carefully planted clues to the tale's subsequent surprises. First, there is Hanna's reluctance to look at any text, be it a book, a travel brochure or a menu, or to write anything. What is she avoiding? The second is the emphasis placed on her uniform as a public transport employee. This gives her an official, military look.
The second chapter unfolds in 1966 when Michael is a law student at Heidelberg, still yearning for Hanna. A sympathetic teacher, Professor Rohl (played by Bruno Ganz, who brings to this impeccable liberal figure a whiff of his Hitler in Downfall) launches a seminar for bright pupils to scrutinise the issues of guilt and crimes against humanity and takes them to a trial in a nearby town.
There, Michael discovers to his horror that Hanna and other Auschwitz guards are in the dock, accused of appalling conduct at the camp and a callous atrocity while escorting a death march of Jewish prisoners away from the advancing Russians. Ironically, it is a book by a Jewish survivor that has occasioned the trial.
Hanna does little to clear her name and it becomes evident to us and to Michael that this is in some way connected - I will say no more - with literacy. She is, apparently out of pride and shame, willing to accept greater blame than her co-defendants, a frumpy collection of middle-aged women, quite unlike the comely Hanna. Moreover, for a congeries of reasons, Michael doesn't come to her assistance. He feels betrayed, morally tainted, ethically disoriented and unforgiving.
The third chapter covers Hanna's lengthy jail sentence, during which Michael communicates with her fervently but only via cassettes of great literary works. Thereafter comes a pair of codas, one concerning the divorced Michael's reconciliation with his estranged daughter, the other a visit he makes to New York to see an Auschwitz survivor, one of the witnesses at Hanna's trial She's played with an icy moral superiority by Lena Olin and most of her excellent dialogue is provided by Hare. "What do you think those places were - universities?" she asks the anguished Michael. "What are you looking for? Forgiveness for her or to feel better about yourself? If you are looking for catharsis, go to the theatre or literature. Don't go to the camps."
This double-edged statement brings into question much of what has gone before. The reflections on guilt, responsibility and the relationship between generations are betrayed by the contrived fiction into which they've been inserted by Schlink, a lawyer born in 1944 who writes detective stories. Scene by scene, we're gripped, but the metaphor is elusive, the narrative unconvincing and the overall effect vague and unpersuasive. The key clicks smoothly in the lock but no doors of perception open up.
I'm also a little troubled by the movie being made in English. And, disconcertingly, the books Michael reads from are English versions. Won't this be odd when, as almost certainly it will be, the movie is dubbed into German?