Where Kerr’s plain prose made clear the muddle of half-comprehending terror and excitement in these overnight disappearances and covert goodbyes, Link’s polished, deliberate approach doesn’t ever knot the stomach to quite the same extent: If the practical and emotional stakes of the family’s crisis are clarified in several heart-to-heart talks between Anna and her weary-wry father, the rhythm of the filmmaking is a little too even to ever suggest much threat. Anna rationalizes this upheaval as little more than a novel vacation what no one quite has the heart to tell her is that she’s unlikely to see her Berlin home again any time soon, if ever. Her journalist father Arthur (Oliver Masucci) is an outspoken critic of the Nazi Party fearful that his passport will be confiscated, he hurriedly hops the border to Switzerland, arranging for his composer wife Dorothea (Carla Juri, “Blade Runner 2049”) and children to follow in due course. To her, Nazis are little more than costume villains, though on the eve of Hitler’s election, her parents are rather more concerned. We meet 9-year-old Anna in Berlin in 1933, hiding from boys in Nazi uniform at a children’s fancy-dress party, before her Zorro-masked older brother Max (Marinus Hohmann, warmly responsive with his onscreen sister) fends them off. Wholly captivating in her big-screen debut, Riva Krymalowski is not just a vivid physical match for the dark, lively figure of Kerr’s illustrations, but has the rare child actor’s gift of playing alert thoughtfulness without veering into the precious or precocious. The new film’s great coup is the casting of its preteen protagonist Anna, a fretful and fanciful child who understands the ugly realities of the German Reich only in terms of how they disrupt her small, cosseted domestic world.
The prevailing tone here is not far from that of Link’s Oscar-winning 2002 feature “Nowhere in Africa,” which also depicted the fish-out-of-water refugee experience of a German-Jewish family in the 1930s, softening a few sharp edges along the way. Unlike the book, this gently paced, multilingual saga is likely to be embraced more by an adult audience than a youthful one: Kerr’s bifocal storytelling trick of conveying harsh grown-up history in naive terms is harder to replicate on the screen than on the page. screens nearly 18 months after its release in Germany, Link’s film should satisfy the nostalgic demands of any viewers who grew up on Kerr’s novel - in large part thanks to some ideal casting and attentive period detailing.
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