| Overall Grade: |
A- |
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| Story: |
A- |
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| Acting: |
A |
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| Direction: |
A |
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| Visuals: |
B+ |
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The Down-To-Earth Cold War.
by ruth (movies profile)
Aug 21, 2006
This movie was a well-developed exposition of the effect of the partition of Berlin on the actual Berliners living in the city at the time the wall went up and after. Von Trotta shows us the reality beneath the skin of the political rhetoric that was all that those of us outside of Berlin saw.
At the outset, the commonly-held feeling that the Wall would not be around for long transcended the structure itself. As time wore on, the characters soldiered on -- some in the East refusing to renounce their principles (and suffering mightily for their quotidian courage) and others there accepting the better of a number of alternatives -- all of them awful -- offered them by the regime and the ever-present threat of imprisonment, exile to the outer fringes of life (where a talented astro-physicist becomes a janitor in a factory) or worse.
Finally, the film made manifest the reality that by the time the Wall came down, there was a whole new generation on both sides. For many, by 1989, there was nothing that they could identify with on the other side. |
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