THE READER

Several Hollywood critics have derided Stephen Daldry’s The Reader as ‘yet another Holocaust movie’, ‘an excuse for soft porn and Kate Winslet’s extensive nude scenes a misplaced measure of her commitment to craft’, ‘a cold, disconnected drama’ etc. While the film doesn’t come together quite as precisely as Daldry’s earlier work The Hours did, this David Hare adaptation of a popular German book by Bernhard Schlink, is anything but simple or trite. The Reader isn’t about the Holocaust, but an indictment of all the ordinary Germans who aided/abetted Hitler’s genocide either by participation or tacit support, a second generation that shouldered the shame, guilt or anger about their collective responsibility in the program and the idea of selective memory and justice. It’s also a profound comment on how much a single event can alter and define entire lives; the complexity of human nature, the ebb and flow of emotions and ultimately, the burden of past choices that weighs upon the present and in some ways shapes the way futures evolve.

Spread across four decades from the 1950s to the 1990s, it’s the journey of two characters whose paths cross quite by chance. Michael (David Kross) a West German school boy gets off a tram and is sick outside a non-descript building, when a woman mysteriously emerges from the shadows to help him clean up. Three months later, Michael lands up at her doorstep and his unabashed adulation and her lack of human contact launches them into a torrid physical relationship. For the boy, it’s an initiation into adulthood, for the woman, Hanna (Kate Winslet), it seems like an opportunity to revel in her favourite pastime – books. Yes, a crucial element of their bargain is Hanna’s insistence that Michael read to her before and after sex – there’s everything from Homer’s Odessey to Lady Chatterley’s Lover and Tin Tin comics on the menu. But there’s more to Hanna’s obsession with being read to than she’s ready to reveal, and the narrative is sprinkled with clues leading up to the second phase of their lives nearly a decade later, long after Hanna suddenly disappeared from Michael’s life without a goodbye.

In 1966, Michael is studying law and accompanies his liberal professor (Bruno Ganz who’s a chilling reminder of Hitler’s ‘Downfall’) to a trial of Nazi workers in a nearby town, initiated because of the publishing of a tell-all book by a survivor’s daughter. There, amongst the defendants (mostly a bunch of unremarkable middle-aged women) shines through a voice who’s not afraid to be forthright – “What would you have done?” she asks the judge when he tries to pin her down to crimes she committed in Auschwitz. Hanna is matter-of-fact about her role as a guard who was doing her duty as was demanded of her – resulting in the burning of 300 inmates in a church fire. But pride and shame drives her to withhold a crucial piece of information, which has a direct impact on her sentence. For these trial scenes alone Kate Winslet deserves all the awards in the world. The range of emotions she conveys sitting in the dock far outweighs anything else she’s done on screen in the past decade and a half.

Later, the professor brings up the tricky issue of morality versus legality as an angry student expresses disgust about his parents’ generation for their contribution to Hitler’s cause and inability to acknowledge the truth. Hanna’s conviction is, in a sense, determined by Michael’s decision to remain silent despite being privy to her weakness – brought on due to anger, confusion and a bruised ego. She goes to prison, he into a lifelong shell that not even his grown up daughter can draw him from.

In 1995, Michael (Ralph Fiennes) is a lonely man haunted by his memories and still unable to shake off the past. He’s spent Hanna’s prison sentence making audio tapes of books and despatching them to her on a regular basis. Both are defined by their choices. But many others get off with a much lighter sentence and somehow this skewed justice stinks. Eventually, there’s no closure for Hanna or Michael – as the writer whose book led to Hanna’s trial tells Michael towards the end of the film, there’s no catharsis in the Holocaust story. Which may well be the reason filmmakers turn to it over and over again, in the hope that revisiting this horrific period in recent history might help prevent its recurrence. But as Daldry’s film plainly suggests, there are innumerable other crimes and atrocities that go unnoticed because like everything else, we pick our causes.

Deepa Deosthalee