If a film can trigger unexpected emotions and sensations that connect us to our surroundings, it would have done its job. Such a film is Alone in Berlin, starring Brendan Gleeson and Emma Thompson, which never made it to India but I saw in Toronto several years ago.
The film is about a German couple which lives in a Berlin working class neighbourhood. It is 1940, the war has begun, and a militarised Germany is in full swing. We are straightaway introduced to their trauma – Otto and Anna Quangel have lost their only son in the war.
But in grief, they find liberation. Through perilously brave actions, this couple leaves the sort of positive legacy that thousands of ordinary people must have done in those terrible times, even if forgotten and unsung.
Otto and Anna resolve to resist Nazi tyranny in an ingenuous way. But it is not just personal tragedy they are fighting. The Nazi thugs and common criminals who ransack the home of an elderly Jewish woman also create a counterpoint to their grief, and these two events gives the couple the strength to begin their resistance.
Their protest takes the form of postcards with anti-Nazi texts, which they leave in public spaces for common people to read. Otto is finally found out when the cards slip out of his pocket in the workplace, and the couple meet their end on the guillotine.
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This film is a cinematic paradox that only the best acting resolves: it moves at a slow pace, but instead of getting bored we remain in suspense. Gleeson’s understated dignity and stoic determination anchors the film’s moral underpinning. The ending, where the Nazi police officer, brilliantly portrayed by Daniel Bruhl, releases the pile of “freedom cards” through the window, as passersby pick them up to read, and then shoots himself, delivers a posthumous vindication of the dead couple’s steadfast loyalty to the common good, never mind the overwhelming Nazi power lurking in every alley of the decrepit neighbourhood.
When humans have no choice but to find their freedom in death, the implications can be terrifying. I could not escape the film’s power to unsettle the audience, even at its languid pace, and each scene was carved in abundant morality. This is a marker for Europe’s continuing trauma, and its inability to bring closure to the Nazi epoch. One might wonder how Germans view this film.
In India, we see very few films like this. Alone in Berlin never got a release in India. It is, after all, a European film, not a Hollywood blockbuster. But when it comes to nuanced acting, Europe continues to lead, poking our eye with the subtle ambiguities of every ordinary event.
The streets, the costumes, the tension between common sense and Nazi vitriol, the bleak snow of the late evening, with the only cheer provided by the lights of the tram cars, all of these bring to us the smells and atmosphere of the Berlin of 1940, of that “low and dishonest decade,” as W.H. Auden wrote in the poem ‘September 1, 1939’.
The film’s deeper impact on me went beyond cinematic enjoyment. For an Indian, connecting with European culture is easier than understanding the West beyond the Atlantic. European cities use space in an imaginative and economical manner, and that is how the working class Berlin neighbourhood is depicted in this film.
My best memory of Lisbon, where I lived four years ago, is its plentiful walkways and compactness. In Toronto, where the soaring towers are like instant short cuts to the heavens, we are unable to create intimacy with our surroundings, or even a dialogue, or a sense of community with passers-by, who are so dwarfed by the skyscrapers. What is happening above us is so far above that we are not even aware of it, yet there is plenty of life on the upper reaches of these buildings.
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Lisbon had no such buildings, and I felt as if I was part of the city’s wider conversations. The best landscapes are the ones that create multiple sensations, both at the psychological and visual levels.
This cinematic experience on a cold and wet day reminded me of our chance encounter with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau at Niagara on the Lake a few days earlier, where he delivered a speech by the lake, to mark World Environment Day. Amid the perils of global warming, which might have brought unexpectedly cold and wet weather to the Toronto of June, we can see how connected humanity is, and how fragile our planet has become. That is why the Nazi trauma is my own trauma, and European cities make me think about what the great medieval cities of India and China might have been like. Watching a film, after all, can have multiple rewards.
Jitendra Nath Misra is a former ambassador, and vice president of the Jawaharlal Nehru Hockey Tournament Society.