Two Stories Braided Together

Rating: 9/10 (29 September 2017)

I hate spoilers, and so I'll avoid revealing too much. The movie is beautifully filmed and acted, and perhaps due to that acting, the character of Hannah Schmitz draws our sympathy despite....Well, she commits more than one act that some viewers find unforgivable. But for all the intensity in the love affair that consumes the first hour of the film, the movie isn't merely about the passion between Michael and Hannah, and while it is partly a coming of age story, it is also about how the two halves of the movie interpenetrate each other, just as the young Michael's rigid, very serious home life counterpoints his more joyful life at school and the past cross pollinates with the present.
The second half of the movie, bridged to the first by Michael's enrollment in law school and more conventional coming-of-age experiences that begin to form him into the adult he will become--or WOULD were it not for the reentry of Hannah into his life these eight years later--communicates in flashbacks and images parallel to the first half while alluding to events that happen when Michael is an infant.
Perhaps a couple of turning points in the plot are unnecessarily confusing in that twice Hannah receives a promotion at work that she refuses, albeit for a crucial thematic reason: she leaves her factory job with Siemans to work as a guard then (though revealed first in the movie) leaves her job as a tram ticket-taker to go who knows where until, eight years later, she resurfaces in the courtroom. When she has her affair with Michael she is living in the Siemans building--employee housing, I guess. Suffice to say that Siemans was her main employer before and after her tenure as a guard. At any rate, for those who know the basic historical time-line and watch the dates as they appear on the screen, these changes won't be so confusing. In the same vein, Lena Olin plays both the once young survivor who grows up to write the memoir that will expose Hannah AND, 20 years later, her NYC daughter. Giving the movie the benefit of the doubt, we can say that one of its themes is the ineluctability of the past and the quest for closure to it.
Like others, I think the chemistry between Hannah/Kate and Michael/David Kross is special, and it might make all the difference in how we receive their relationship. However, some viewers will see her less as 'human' and more as anti-social, debauched, while seeing the older Michael as damaged, but that may not lessen for them the film's impact.