Mature Tale of Love, Guilt, Undoing.

Rating: 7/10 (20 February 2010)

In the era of the Beatles a young law student, David Kross, has an intense affair with an older woman, Kate Winslet. She loves it when he reads to her -- "Ulysses," "Huckleberry Finn," Chekhov. The fling lasts only one summer, then Winslet disappears. One of Kross's seminars takes a field trip to a court in which half a dozen women are being tried for crimes committed during the war, twenty-five years earlier. Kross is flabbergasted to find that Winslet is not only a defendant but appears to have been the leader of the female guards, and the one who made the decision to allow concentration camp inmates to die in a flaming church rather than free them and allow "chaos" on the streets.
Winslet winds up sentenced to life in prison. After ten years or so, Kross -- now morphed into an adult who looks exactly like Ralph Feinnes -- begins sending her taped copies of books, which she devours.
After twenty years she is due for release but has no family or other contacts except Feinnes. He's never visited her or written to her but he's the only person who is in a position to help her after so many years of imprisonment.
A couple of things stand out. One is Kate Winslet's performance. It's a difficult role. She must age twenty years on screen, and she must somehow combine pathos with a grim determination -- and she does it. She was only in her early thirties when this was shot but she matures convincingly, aided by discrete make up that gives her gray hair and rubescent eyelids.
During her affair with the virginal Kross, who looks hardly old enough to be in high school, let alone university, she's constantly taking baths and showers, which was fine with me. She even takes to having Kross stand naked in the tub while she roughly scrubs him down, haunted, we suppose, by guilt. (Cf., Lady MacBeth.) Mostly she dominates him, ordering him around, postponing their love making until after he reads to her. Why does she want him to read books aloud? Because she's illiterate. The viewer doesn't get to know this until she is in prison. We see her painfully printing simple notes to Feinnes about what kind of books to read on tape ("more romance"), crossing out mispellings -- the assiduous scrawl of a kindergarten child.
The word "redemption" is, I think, way overused. It has a religious ring to it that doesn't always apply, and certainly not here. Time to substitute Freud's "undoing", a no-nonsense, strictly non-metaphysical act of "making up" for the harm you've done. In this case, it devolves into the delivery of a cheap tin can that once held tea and now holds a pitifully small amount of carefully saved money, a carefully nurtured nest egg of no consequence at all.