Wonderful film chronicling the fear, guilt and moral predicaments a young man undergoes when he thinks he's stumbled into a dream situation.

Rating: 8/10 (31 October 2009)

The Reader begins in 1995 as a certain Michael Berg stands in his Berlin home early on in the day. There's a disagreement with a woman who's there as well; could be anybody, and she accuses him in an angry manner that he's been distant with her, ignoring her and that he is unable to follow the simplest of commands when it is revealed he did not wake her up. She storms out, and Michael is left to contemplate what's been said. It's a relatively straight forward but extremely poignant way in which to start capturing this person's attitudes to relationships and women. Berg doesn't have much of a retort to these accusations; as the film develops, we realise the importance a mere fling had on his life, and maybe we think that he's attempting to regress back to a child-like state, when off the cusp sex with strangers drastically opened his mind. Berg thought he knew of a certain female individual from many-a year ago, while the could-be deliberate 'distancing' himself in relation to the girl in the opening keeps the anonymity prominent.
The film will eventually flash back to 1958, before returning to the then-present and chronicling various incidences and the years in which these things happened; all the while building to a rather tragic denouement. Ralph Fiennes plays Michael Berg as an adult, and he is accompanied by a certain David Kross, a young German actor whose career, based on this evidence, is promising to say the least. The film is all about Berg; how one chance meeting shapes lives, his and other people's. The film, like a certain book he reads to a certain Hanna Schmitz in his youth partly entitled "Homer's", is an odyssey of what makes him who he and others are.
It's a testament to Roger Daldry's film that The Reader can shoot all over the place in terms of jumping to specific times in people's lives spanning four different decades. The film never feels sporadic or dis-jointed, despite all this hopping about. I like The Reader a lot, predominantly because it unfolds over a number of years. It takes years to come to terms with some things; it takes years to comprehend certain other things. As a film that explores whatever friendships; relationships; acquaintancies or mutual-understandings two people of contrasting 'sorts' go through, or as a film that explores somewhat unnatural or 'taboo' understandings between two people, The Reader nails it.
If one was to think of another recent example, Ang Lee's 2006 film Brokeback Mountain might count as a film that explored chance pairings, which in turn prolonged deeper feelings that rose to the surface as well as realisations of certain sensations. For Michael in The Reader, that sensation is coming-of-age. His relationship with Hanna is one that sees him engaging in rather regular sessions of a sexual nature following school; something he takes for granted; something that I think he sees as the equivalent of stumbling into a sexual fantasy, with absolutely no way of it terminating because it feels so right at that time for him. Within the actual relationship, Hanna adopts the more dominant half of the pairing. Her sheltering of Michael as he sits, helplessly, in the entrance of her apartment building coughing and shivering as a result of the driving rain, already establishes a position of power over a somewhat helpless flu victim. Once he's in better health, her ordering of him to fetch coal and to complete other such menial tasks takes over as the order of the relationship, and she dictates as to whether he will read to her before or after they engage in sexual episodes.
Hanna's apartment as a cinematic space sees most of the small and un-kept location of her general living area as a location in which Michael, in his closed off Utopian place away from school and the family, can indulge in his whatever budding submissive and sexual sensations he, at that stage in his life, wants to explore. The most interesting aspect of this apartment is its bathroom area; a further space closed off within a location already established to be closed off. The bathing area comes equipped with a curtain on a rail, a physical and very symbolic object that allows the character to place a barrier between them and the rest of the living area – it is no coincidence that the two frequently find solace in this area, reading and so forth. At one point, Hanna hits Michael after a disagreement and an argument; she runs a bath; the bathing space is closed off from whatever goes on outside of it and they seem at ease again in what is some sort of recognition of the human form in its rawest form.
The film develops, and Hanna cuts off contact with Michael, although they will both share a common bond between them in their time apart. Their respective journeys through life, following the affair, is all about coming to terms with the past, and accepting what you let happen. For Michael as he grows older, it is the fact he just jumped into the goings on with Hanna whereas for her, her bleak past to do with some Jewish-related atrocities that happened during The Second World War comes back to haunt. The study plays out wonderfully, with a lot of dramatic weight. As far as film-making goes, each period in history is superbly brought to life; the switching from dank, rainy evenings in the 1950s to the bright, sunny afternoons of the 1990s combine brilliantly while the young actor Kross impresses; particularly in a moment later on in which he notices Hanna after all those years and emotes the necessary emotions in his acting. As an all round piece exploring an array of various notions combining with the basics of bringing a text to life, The Reader excels.