Art cinema lite

Rating: 5/10 (15 January 2009)

The sure sign of a lazy, unimaginative film maker is their compulsion to trowel on layer after layer of syrupy music at crucial scenes, instructing us what we re supposed to feel. Which this does throughout its 120 minutes.
This is one for the would be art house crowd, people who want to feel they ve seen a quality film, without having to make any intellectual effort or find themselves challenged in any way, shape or form.
Director Stephen Daldry pulls the same trick he did with Billy Elliott. That film presented elements of gritty northern British realism but filtered everything controversial or meaningful out, leaving us with empty images.
This film ticks all the boxes with high production values, sumptuous cinematography but makes the retrogressive step of having its actors speak with German accents. We're thus treated to Kate Winslett as ze stereotypical bad German who must obey zer orderz.
An issue around how empathy and imagination, being able to imagine yourself in someone elses shoes, can be tied in with literature, being able to read...these issues are never explored. The act of reading, of imagining. If you are illiterate, as is Kate Winslett's character, does this mean your thought processes are more concrete, that you are more susceptible to carry out the kind of atrocities perpetrated by Hannah? Because you have limited capacities of imagining?
A film on this subject must require more effort on the part of the viewer. Otherwise it is a disservice to the memory of those who perished in the camps.