Starvation dogs their steps, especially with baby Peter (Leander Holaschke) in tow Lore soon must trade a piece of jewelry just to induce a nursing mother they encounter to breastfeed the infant one time. The trains are quickly commandeered by the Allied armies, so they must walk the 500 miles. She gives Lore all the family’s remaining money and valuables and instructs her to buy train tickets to Hamburg, near where Omi lives.īy the time Mutti departs, she has apparently already been raped by soldiers, and the pervasiveness of rape as a weapon of conquest is but one of the harsh realities that will soon become the day-to-day “new normal” for Lore and her siblings. And go wrong things often do, right from the outset, as her SS officer father (Hans-Jochen Wagner) torches all his incriminating files and puts down the family dog as they are forced to flee the advancing Allied troops.Ī rustic cottage in rural Bavaria proves not much of a haven, as food runs short and neighbors prove less than welcoming to the clueless adolescent girl who automatically greets new acquaintances with a “Heil Hitler.” Soon Vati (Daddy) has to head back to the front not long after, the thin, stressed-out, chain-smoking Mutti (Mommy) brings word that their beloved Fuehrer is dead and that she will have to go to an internment camp. ![]() Like her mother (Ursina Lardi) and grandmother (Eva-Maria Hagen) before her, Lore tends to be harsh and punitive and to look for someone else to blame anytime something goes wrong. Newcomer Saskia Rosendahl does a remarkable job in the difficult role. It doesn’t help that Lore (short for Hannelore), the 14-year-old girl who must lead her four younger siblings on a long, grueling journey through the German countryside in hopes of reaching their Omi’s (Grandma’s) house, is rather a bitch. The Australian/British/German production is by no stretch of the imagination a right-wing propaganda film but it wants to make the point that in war, children in particular suffer horribly, no matter which side they’re on. ![]() Nevertheless, even adults are challenged and disturbed when a movie like Cate Shortland’s Lore, currently at Upstate Films, asks us to see the waning days of World War II through the eyes of a German family that is thoroughly immersed in Nazi ideology, and even to feel some compassion for them. In art as in life, the ability to calibrate our responses continually to a person is a sign of increasing maturity and sophistication. And when we read a story or go to a movie, we are programmed to identify the good and bad guys as swiftly as possible in order to know where to invest our emotional attachment.īut the older we get and the more stories that we take in, the less satisfying such easy-to-digest rosters of characters become, while the morally ambiguous or growing, changing protagonist begins to exert a greater fascination. It’s deeply ingrained in our culture to view the world as being divided up this way, despite all the daily-gathered evidence that dark and light sides dwell within each of us. ![]() Recent remarks by the head of the National Rifle Association in response to the Sandy Hook massacre, claiming that the only answer to “bad guys with guns” is an increased presence of “good guys with guns,” might serve to stimulate some overdue consideration of the whole concept of good guys and bad guys. Saskia Rosendahl in Cate Shortland’s Lore.
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