DRAMA; 2hr 4min (German with subtitles)
STARRING: Liv Lisa Fries, Johannes Hegemann
One summer: Hegemann and Fries
With their freshly scrubbed wholesomeness, dental assistant Hilde Coppi (Fries) and her donnish husband Hans (Hegemann) look more like a pair of cerebral librarians than the daredevil German Resistance members they in fact are in the “remarkable true story” that is director Andreas Dresen’s moving slice of modern history. The knife edge of the couple’s apparently unremarkable existence in 1942 Berlin is mapped out in a series of small, deliberate steps by screenwriter Laila Steiler as the call of a conviction that leads the Coppis into the death grip of the Gestapo.
The ultimate futility of their defiance — its wall-posting of “inflammatory texts” and its shortwave-radio messaging of the Russian Secret Service interwoven with carefree river-bank picnics that underscore just how young Hilde, Hans and their “Red Orchestra” allies are — is pretty much a guarantee from the get-go, given the annihilation machine they’re all up against. Hilde and Hans don’t care. They’re newly in love in a golden summer when sticking it to the Nazis could almost have been a game of chance if the stakes were not so finite. But this deadly game was always preordained: Hilde gives birth to her and Hans’s son in a draconian custody where, although her catalogue of petty crimes has long since lost its lustre, she comes into her heroic own with a sustaining, unshakeable courage.
In the pitch-black bigger picture, Hilde and others like her are mere fragments of a terrible mosaic. Yet their blazing resolve in the implacable face of evil is a testimony of daring that can never be retold too often.
