Wrong on so many levels

Rating: 3/10 (9 November 2010)

Recently two German movies (Jud Süß -- Film ohne Gewissen and Goethe!) were summarily scolded for not being historically accurate enough. The critics that agreed should better steer well clear of "Der Vorleser", which ploughs through complex issues such as sexual abuse and the Nazi dictatorship like an icebreaker through a box of Ben And Jerry's. In a nutshell: in the 1950ies, a 15-year-old boy who looks surprisingly like a 25-year-old underwear model, begins a sexual relationship with a sexy older woman. As it turns out, she's illiterate and lets the guy read to her -- strictly the classics, of course. It's one of those sexual- sensual scenes that chicks go all mushy over. When her employer is about to find out that she's illiterate, she runs away from the job and her lover. Years later, the boy is fully grown into a law student and meets his lover again, this time she's tried for having been an SS guard and having let 300 prisoners burn to death. Again, she doesn't want to let out that she's illiterate (and therefore couldn't have written an incriminating report) she is being sentenced to prison for life. Twenty years later she is about to be let go, and her former lover -- who knew all the time that she was innocent but for some reason did nothing to free her -- accepts to take care of her (pretty creepy lack of responsibility on the side of the authorities there), but there is a sudden turn of events ...
As it is, the movie is a flood of sensual images stapled together by a ludicrous and highly irritating story. Possibly the book was a lot better because you can be much subtler in writing.