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German director Andreas Dresen continues to explore notable but not always well-known figures from the margins of his homeland’s history with his latest drama, From Hilde, With Love. As in Dresen’s last, Rabiye Kurnaz vs. George W. Bush, which revolved around a mother fighting to get her son out of Guantanamo prison, the key figure here is a woman, Hilde Coppi (Liv Lisa Fries), a left-wing member of a cell in the German Resistance group the Red Orchestra, who gave birth in a Berlin prison during WWII.
Made with well-considered period detail and suffused by a dusty, slanted light thanks to DP Judith Kaufmann, this works as an evocative and affecting portrait of love in a time of genocide. That’s despite the fact that its protagonist is mostly soft-spoken, reticent and reserved throughout — nothing like the warrior queens and Amazonian figures popular cinema loves to laud as female role models.
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From Hilde, With Love
Cast: Liv Lisa Fries, Johannes Hegemann, Lisa Wagner, Alexander Scheer, Emma Bading, Sina Martins, Lisa Hrdina, Lena Urzendowsky, Hans-Christian Hegewald, Nico Ehrenteit, Jacob Keller, Tilla Krachtowil, Rachel Braunschweigh, Heike Hanold-Lynch, Claudiu Mark Draghici, Thomas Lawinky, Fritzi Haberlandt, Florian Lukas
Director: Andreas Dresen
Screenwriter: Laila Stieler
2 hours 4 mins
It’s not hard to imagine that if there had been a film about Hilde and her husband Hans (Johannes Hegemann), made, say, in the 1990s, he and his male colleagues would probably have been the central figures, heroically flyposting anti-Nazi slogans and operating illegal radios while Hilde and the other women made coffee in the background and fretted. It’s worth knowing that the “Red Orchestra” (who only got that nickname posthumously) attained near-mythical heroic status in East Germany after the war, hyped by the GDR’s need to play up the existence of any kind of anti-Nazi resistance during the Reich’s reign, and also play up said resistance’s allegiances with Communist Moscow.
According to the film’s press notes, there were streets and schools named after Hilde, Hans and their comrades in East Germany, many of which were renamed after reunification in the 1990s. Recent historical accounts present a more measured view of the Red Orchestra, whose activities were pretty modest, hardly likely to bring down the Fatherland. Mostly they flyposted anti-Nazi slogans and wrote to the families of German prisoners of war, whom they listened to reporting on their status via the Soviet’s propaganda broadcasting, which Germans were forbidden from listening to. The infractions seem trivial and yet nearly all of them were sentenced to death and executed for these so-called crimes.
Dresen and screenwriter Laila Stieler (Dresen’s collaborator since Stilles Land in 1992) show us all that, as well as all the drama and romance of how Hilde and Hans fell in love, via non-chronological flashbacks that come to Hilde as she struggles to survive eight months in prison. This grueling period is the present tense of the film — a time during which she is interrogated and threatened by the Gestapo; survives the very difficult birth of her son, Hans Jr.; tries to help other women in prison; and lives through all that time knowing she was likely to be executed like her husband and the many other members of their cell who were also being held at Plötzensee prison.
Using long, slow takes that evoke the drudgery of prison life, Dresen and Kaufmann paint a drably colored yet vivid portrait of the complex personalities who collide in Plötzensee, starting with Hilde herself. A shy, bespeckled, mere slip of thing, Hilde is shown to be many things at once: resilient and capable of withstanding pain, yet not able to resist the pressure to name her collaborators; described as prudish by her friends, and yet privately a very sensual woman as seen in the flashback love scenes with Hans. She may have seemed superficially less bohemian than the rest of her set, but she brought practicality and smarts to the table — the kind of person every resistance group needs who remembers to bring paper and glue and knows how to type. If anything, Hans’ character feels a little underwritten beside her. He’s just the good-looking, lunkish husband who means well, although Hegemann does his best to bring him to life.
It’s the second-string supporting characters who fascinate here: the sexy stupid revolutionaries in the gang who are into polyamorous relationships well before that was a thing; the agonized priest (Dresen regular Alexander Scheer) who tries to give succor to Hilde in her hours of greatest need; the female prison guard, Annelise Kuehn (Lisa Wagner), who alternates mercurially between showing Hilde mercy and malice.
Dresen has always been a reliable hand at this kind of detailed, thoughtful, humanist world-building, and the work here is lush and incisive enough to make one wonder what it would have been like if he’d managed to make this into a sprawling series profiling more of these characters in depth. But as it stands, From Hilde feels tidy and complete, speaking like its heroine with a soft still voice about the importance of love, and the deep need to do something right, no matter how small, to defy corrupt, monstrous regimes.
Full credits
Cast: Liv Lisa Fries, Johannes Hegemann, Lisa Wagner, Alexander Scheer, Emma Bading, Sina Martins, Lisa Hrdina, Lena Urzendowsky, Hans-Christian Hegewald, Nico Ehrenteit, Jacob Keller, Tilla Krachtowil, Rachel Braunschweigh, Heike Hanold-Lynch, Claudiu Mark Draghici, Thomas Lawinky, Fritzi Haberlandt, Florian Lukas
Production companies: Beta Cinema, Pandora Film Production, Rundfunk Berlin-Brandenburg, Kinoinitiative Leuchtstoff, Arte, Ziegler Film, Iskremas
Director: Andreas Dresen
Screenwriter: Laila Stieler
Producers: Claudia Steffen, Christoph Friedel
Executive producer: Fee Buck
Director of photography: Judith Kaufmann
Production designer: Susanne Hopf
Costume designer: Birgitt Kilian
Editor: Joerg Hauschild
Sound: Andreas Walther, Oswald Schwander, Ralf Krause
Casting: Karen Wendland
Sales: Beta Cinema
2 hours 4 mins
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