Accent should have been on suspense
Alone in Berlin 12A cert, 103 min
★★★★★ Dir Vincent Pérez Starring Emma Thompson, Daniel Brühl, Brendan Gleeson
The story of Otto and Elise Hampel, an anti-hitler couple in wartime Berlin, inspired the novelist Hans Fallada to write a fictional account in 1947, belatedly published in 2009 under the English title Alone in Berlin.
The story certainly doesn’t lack potential, not least in the cloak-anddagger suspense of explaining how the Hampels – renamed Otto and Anna Quangel for Fallada’s purposes – became virtual spies, finding ways to deposit 285 protest postcards in public while evading capture.
Securing Emma Thompson and Brendan Gleeson for the lead roles has got to count as a major head-start for this English-language adaptation. Being directed by Swiss actor Vincent Pérez, possibly not so much. It has a silly script, and gauche direction – what’s left is a coarse, will-this-do quality. Opening with the terrified Quangels’ son running through a forest before being shot down, Pérez’s film brings the news to his parents via a dreadful telegram, delivered to their small upstairs apartment by the local postmistress. As Thompson opens this with clenched horror, she makes Anna’s response more one of bubbling rage than instant grief, a smart way to go – it suggests a pre-existing contempt for the Hitler regime, rather than some placid compliance converted to opposition overnight.
Alas, it’s fully 40 minutes before she gets anything you could call another decent scene, visiting the wife of a senior SS officer as part of her duties with the Nazi Women’s League.
Anna’s husband, the foreman at a coffin factory, shows less emotion altogether. In fact, though, Otto is the one who first puts pen to paper, idly altering the word Führer at his desk to Lügner (“liar”). It’s a moment harbingering the many words of protest which the real Otto, disguising his handwriting, would go on to disseminate. Another clue to the Quangels’ political sensitivities is how quickly they offer shelter to Frau Rosenthal (Monique Chaumette), an elderly Jewish neighbour. Before long, the authorities have chased her to suicide out of a window, and the net is also closing around the Quangels, when a Gestapo investigation headed by the mustachioed Escherich (an almost inevitable Daniel Brühl) narrows its search to those who have recently lost an only son in battle.
Pérez relies on his cast to do what they can with sketchily written roles, and also to pull off that dodgiest of acting tasks, speaking English with a pronounced German accent. Berlin itself, though, gets the award of “worst in show”: it looks laughably clean for a city knuckling under with its war effort. One imagines what Spielberg or De Palma might have done with the alleged suspense scenes – all mounting of stairways, hiding under hat-brims, but not a hint of technical flair or savvy editing. Thompson has to fill in an entire role that the screenplay has barely bothered to assemble for her, and does exactly the creditable job you might expect.