Bunker mentality

Rating: 8/10 (27 November 2007)

Remember the old TV programme from the 70's "You were There", putting the young viewer seemingly at the scene of a historical event - well this movie does that for adults, the authenticity aided of course by the characters conversing in the native German language. The movie of course has to walk a thin line between humanising these infamous characters from history without eliciting sympathy for any of them and succeeds by playing it straight. The only characters from the Nazi camp you really feel for are the innocent Goebbels children in one of the most chilling scenes when their mother, with her husband, the most ardent Nazi of all, who cannot see a place in the future for her infant offspring if the Third Reich fails and silently administers their poison pills after they have been drugged to sleep. The film interestingly does not hold back in its depiction of the real- life horror of the situation, many suicides for example are graphically rendered while contrastingly the camera pans away from the suicides of Hitler, Braun and the Goebbels. The drama also depicts life for ordinary Germans outside the bunker caught between the proverbial rock and a hard place, slaughtered either by their hardline SS countrymen or the invading Russian Red Army, focusing in particular on one small child who sees carnage all around him but comes together at the end with Hitler's idealistic young secretary who cannot offer the ultimate sacrifice of self-destruction taken by so many of the bunker's co-habitants. The performances are uniformly excellent, Bruno Ganz conveying Hitler's detached psychopathy in his crazed outbursts and yet still able to captivate the young pretty socialite Eva Braun. Cult of personality indeed. Best performance for me though is that by Corinna Farhouch as Mrs Goebbels, a striking character study of misguided devotion to an abhorrent creed. The creation of the battle-ravaged heart of Berlin is excellently done with several attention-grabbing images which ingrain themselves in the memory. Would it have been better shot in black and white just to complete the realism, however? Perhaps, but that's a minor gripe in what is ultimately a tautly told lesson from history.