Amrum, Fatih Akin’s coming of age melodrama, reteams the vet director and star Diane Kruger in a period drama set on the North Frisian Island of Amrum in the final days of World War II.
Grade: B (*** out of *****)
The film is based on the childhood memories of German director and writer Hark Bohm, who was initially set to make this film.
The protagonist is an empathetic boy named Nanning (Jasper Billerbeck), the eldest child in his family, who works in the potato fields or gathers driftwood for firewood to help his mother (Kruger), a staunch Nazi and in advanced pregnancy, feed the family.
Nanning, his aunt Ena, and two younger siblings had to flee to the island from bombed-out Hamburg. Nanning’s father is an SS-Obersturmbannführer (lieutenant colonel) and is away at war. His wife is left to fend for herself on Amrum, while the villagers secretly listen to proscribed jazz on the radio.
As the war draws to a close, Nanning faces new challenges. Since the birth of his sister and Hitler’s deathg, his mother has fallen into deep depression and refuses to eat. Nanning tries to find creative ways to fulfill her craving for white bread with butter and honey. This is no easy task, as the war has left the island with a severe shortage of supplies. Through bartering, he tries to obtain the coveted ingredients like butter and sugar.
The boy gets to know the island, its inhabitants and their Frisian languagee. While helping with seal hunting and gutting a rabbit, he learns that his uncle Theo, who gave him a whaling knife, had to stay in America because of the Nazis, and his fiancée, Ruth, was murdered.
In a dream squence, Theo confronts the boy by stating: “You are not to blame, but you are still involved,” which serves as one of the film’s subtextual messages. As the younger of the two, he bears no personal guilt for his parents’ Nazi past, but he could never escape their legacy.
Even so, though grounded in a particular socio-political milieu, Amrum‘s message is universal, suggesting that had the boy been brought up under different circumstances, he would have been an ordinary child, doing good instead of brewing hateful thoughts.
Like the nonjudgmental approach that defines his other observant films, Akin tries to understand the human roots of any evil (Nazi-bred included), based on his belief that the only way to disable it is through knowing and understanding the contexts in which it originated.
The German-Turkish filmmaker went on to win the best screenplay honor for The Edge of Heaven at the 2007 Cannes Film Fest.
As for Diane Kruger, an international star better known in Europe than in the U.S., she too earned her share of kudos, including best actress for In the Hole in the 2017 Cannes Film Fest.
Cast
Jasper Billerbeck as Nanning
Kian Köppke as Hermann
Laura Tonke as Hille Hagener
Diane Kruger as Tessa Bendixen
Lisa Hagmeister as Aunt Ena
Detlev Buck as Sam Gangsters
Matthias Schweighöfer as Uncle Theo
Lars Jessen as Grandpa Arjan
