Starring: Keira Knightley, Alexander Skarsgard, Jason Clarke, and Flora Thiemann
Distributor: Twentieth Century Fox
Runtime: 108 mins. Reviewed in Apr 2019
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This Germany-UK drama is based on the novel of the same name written by Rhidian Brook in 2013. It tells the story of a wife arriving in Hamburg to be reunited with her husband and who falls in love with a German widower. Ridley Scott co-produced the film which is not to be confused with an 2017 American film (“Aftermath”) which was a dramatic thriller about a mid-air plane collision between a passenger airliner and a cargo jet.
Immediately following the end of World War in 1946, Rachael Morgan (Keira Knightley) arrives in a desolate Hamburg to be with her husband, Lewis (Australian actor, Jason Clarke), who is a colonel in the British Forces and who has been assigned to take charge of the post-war reconstruction of the city. Reconstruction means the rebuilding of a shattered city. Rachael is a lonely military wife, and Lewis is a good and honourable man, but emotionally cold. Lewis has requisitioned a house for Rachael and himself to live in at a time when allied forces are repossessing German houses for the duration of the rebuilding effort. She and Lewis have been a long time apart, and struggle to resurrect the intimacy they once had.
Lewis has decided to allow an anguished German widower, Stefan Lubert (Alexander Skarsgard) and his troubled daughter, Freda (Flora Thiemann) to share their house, and to give them a place to stay. Lewis cannot bear to compel Stefan and his daughter to leave the house they owned which Stefan shared with a wife he loved before she died in an allied air-raid bombing. The only son of Rachael and Lewis was also killed in a German bomb blast years before, and they both heavily wear the burden of their son’s death. Lewis compassionately allows Stefan and Freda to occupy the attic of the house, while Stefan works in its garden.
Rachael is stunned that Lewis has made his decision without consulting her. She initially thinks that Lewis wants her to share her home with a possible war criminal, but finds herself drawn to Stefan as a lost-soul in loneliness, as she is herself. Rachael has to endure frequent absences of her husband, and both Rachael and Stefan are desperately in need of companionship.
In the charged atmosphere of lonely, needy people, troubled times, and post-war tensions, a passionate love affair develops between Rachael and Stefan. The movie pursues the theme of forgiveness which follows from their romance, but for most of the movie Knightley plays a lonely, military wife who falls tragically in love with a lonely man.
The film is a well-dressed, luxury period-piece that lightly deals with the motivations that draw people into infidelity and disloyalty. The tragedy of personal conflict gives way to passion that arrives well before the layers of personality are peeled away to reveal the reasons why. This could have been a film about rebuilding lives through moral torment, but chooses instead to grapple superficially with the complex themes of forbidden love, betrayal, fidelity, and honour. The acting that wins the day belongs to Jason Clarke who sensitively captures the conflict of Lewis, as the up-tight military Colonel, who realises he has been betrayed by the wife he desperately wants to love. Clarke acts his character impressively to show Lewis’ pain as well as his vulnerability.
The film has well-meaning performances that slip into melodrama. Costume and scenery set design are evocative and eye catching, but the film is a heady mixture of romance, melodrama, forgiveness and guilt. It is an elegant post-war drama about romantic entanglements which is designed to appeal in just that way.
The film comes to its conclusion, with a predictable finale alongside a moving train, which points the viewer to a complex future for all those involved. It is a film that is good to look at, but misses the beat of moral intent and it flirts with forgiveness and reconciliation without really exploring their true meaning. Shortcomings aside, however, the film has a stylish look that holds its tension.
Peter W. Sheehan is Associate of the Australian Catholic Office for Film and Broadcasting
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