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A nameless woman keeps a diary as the Russians invade Berlin in the spring of 1945. In her desperation, she decides to look for an officer who can protect her. She meets a Russian officer, an encounter which develops into a complex symbiotic relationship that forces them to remain enemies until the bitter end.
The film is well-acted, with restraint, by Hoss and Sidikhin. The writer and director, Max Faerberboeck, employs a level gaze and avoids for the most part artificial sentimentality. The physical production is convincing.
An honourable effort to illustrate a period in post-war German history that remained conveniently shrouded for years.
February 16, 2010
Chicago Reader
No one is guiltless-not the Russian commander (Yevgeny Sidikhin) who takes the heroine as his lover, nor her bourgeois landlady (Fassbinder alumnus Irm Hermann), who welcomes the occupiers for their black market goods.
Though the story is based in truth, an emotionally removed Hoss feels more like a symbol than an actual person, while her detached narration keeps us at further remove.
The suffering of these Berlin women, however tragic, is decontextualized from the infinitely greater crimes against humanity's millions by Germany at the time, which in fact was responsible for their fate.
A clear-eyed portrait of a highly charged chapter in Germany's history, a history that once again proves rewarding fodder for an alert artistic imagination.