The lady with the little dog

Rating: 8/10 (10 February 2009)

(There are Spoilers) 15 year-old Michael Berg, David Cross, is suddenly taken ill on the streets of Neustadt Germany and nurses back to help by a total stranger who seems to have no one but herself to look after. The time is spring 1958 and the stranger in question is 36 year old trolley ticket stamper Hanna Schmitz, Kate Winslet.
It's later when Michael was fully recovered, from Scarlett Fever, that he came back to thank Hanna for all she did for him that he started to fall in love with her. So much so that the two had a hot and sizzling love affair throughout the entire summer of 1958 until Hanna, by leaving town, broke it off. It's now eight years later, 1965, and Michael now in law collage is sent together with his fellow law students by his teacher Prof. Rohl, Bruno Ganz, to see how the law is administrated in the new German Republic. The trial that Michael is to attend and study has to do with a number of former SS women guards at the notorious Aushwitz concentration camp.To Michael's shock and utter surprise the major defendant at the trail is non other then his former lover, and the women who saved his life, Hanna Schmitz! All this is recounted in 1995 by a grown up, and now a lawyer in Berlin, Michael Berg, played by a middle age Ralph Fiennes.
Michael has been haunted all his adult life in not being able to come to Hanna's aid like she did for him when she needed him most, at her trial, with vital information that would have well speared her a lifetime behind bars in a German prison. Not that Hanna was totally innocent of the charges against her in having sent a number of unfit for work women inmates to their ultimate deaths at the Auschwitz concentration camp. But it was the major charge against Hanna that she took full responsibility for, and given the harshest sentence by the court, that she in fact had nothing at all to do with. Hanna's personally writing out and signing the order that caused the deaths of hundreds of Jewish women held captive in an abandoned church.
Hanna as we, as well as Michael who would read books for her, all could see very early in the movie was a functional illiterate. There was no way Hanna could write out a long two or three page order that in effect sent some 300 women prisoners to their death in a locked up church, that was later fire bombed by allied aircraft, since she couldn't even write her own name! The most shocking thing of all is that Hanna felt no remorse in the crimes that she committed during the war, she was only doing her job, but felt greatly embarrassed to the point of getting life, instead of four years, behind bars in her keeping the public from knowing that she couldn't either read or write!
It took years for Michael to get up enough courage to finally go and see Hanna in prison which by then, with Michael's corresponding with her through the mail, she did teach herself to read and write. But by that time Hanna also realized what a monster she was during the war and even with her about to be paroled from prison, after some 20 years behind bars, she came to realize that there was no life left for her outside or behind prison bars.
Academy Award caliber performances by both Ralph Fiennes and 18 year old David Kross as Michael Berg as well as the multi-talented Kate Winslet as the confused, in what she did in the war, and tragic, in what she ultimately did to herself,Hanna Schmitz. There's also worth mentioning in the movie actress Lena Olin playing both Rose and her daughter, some twenty years later, Ilana Mather. It was to Ilana, who's mother was the only survivor of the bombed out church, that Hanna through Michael, as her personal lawyer, left all her earthly belongings. Even though Ilana couldn't keep the money that Hanna left for her, she told Michael to donate it to a hospital burn unit, she did in fact take the colorful tea tin that it was kept in. It reminded Ilana of better times when as a young girl she kept her valuables in a similarly tea tin before the outset of WWII.