Product: Nowhere in Africa (2003)
Rating: 4.0
A marriage falters somewhere in Africa
This movie made me wish I'd paid attention in my college German classes. I hated drawing my eyes away from the film to read the subtitles. But, c'mon, the class started at 8 a.m.!This Holocaust story is very different than most you will read or view, a story of survival from a great distance. It is a story of how one German Jewish family escaped Hitler's death machine through the foresight of the husband. In the late 1930s, while he is a prosperous lawyer and his family comfortable in their upper middle class circles, he moves his wife and daughter to Africa, where he has secured a job as a farmhand.Each of the family members must adjust to their new life, and the tensions of the story arise from their differing ability to adapt. Can the marriage survive all the upheaval and grief? Even to the end, when they must make the difficult decision of whether to stay or return to Germany at the close of World War II, you really can't say whether they will stay together.The story is one of respect, how people from one culture come to respect an entirely different culture. And, as Walter and Jettel's marriage falters, their lack of respect for each other is explored. Jettel cannot respect her husband as a lowly farmhand, and Walter cannot respect his wife's deep loneliness and need for comfort and security. Their daughter Regina is young enough not to struggle with these issues, and it is she who most successfully adapts. But in the end, even she admits that she is happier at her boarding school than at her remote farm, a signal that she might be ready to return to a society in which she can thrive as she grows into womanhood.My other wish is that I had a big-screen TV. The scenery is beautiful. But there are a few scenes I wouldn't want to see as large as life, the scenes that grant this movie its R rating. They are totally unnecessary, added purely for prurient reasons, and nothing that the story itself needs. I'd have granted five stars if the director had shown a little more restraint. But at least we have remote fast-forwarding!