Posts tagged Volker Bruch
“The Reader” Dealing with Guilt
Jan 7th
Dealing with Guilt
“Hotshots” looks at a movie!
THE READER is a searing examination of guilt and not as straightforward as you might think it is from reading about it.
Starring Kate Winslet and Ralph Fiennes, the film questions how one’s life can be tragically affected by keeping a secret or by not revealing all of the truth.
In other words, how does one deal with guilt and shame?
The film begins in 1995 Berlin, but then it uses flashbacks to jump back and forth between 1995 and 1958, when the story begins.
We meet 15-year-old Michael Berg, who becomes sick and throws up in the entryway to an apartment building. A young woman in her thirties named Hanna Schmitz lives there, and she stops to help him.
Michael ends up with scarlet fever, and when he is able to leave his room, his parents tell him that he must go back and thank Hanna, which he does, as well as taking her some flowers.
However, before they know it, they wind up in bed together, which prompts Hanna to say, “So, that’s why you came back.”
Michael becomes a regular visitor, and when Hanna learns what he is studying in school, she asks him to read to her, eventually making their routine that first he reads to her and then they make love.
It takes three such visits before Michael even learns Hanna’s name, and she usually refers to him as “Kid.”
This goes on for quite some time, but one day when Michael arrives at Hanna’s apartment, she is gone and has moved out without having told him.
Then we jump to 1966, and Michael is in Heidelberg Law School. The class attends the trial of six female guards of a Nazi concentration camp in World War II, and Michael is shocked to see that Hanna is one of the former guards on trial.
Watching the trial and hearing the testimony, Michael comes to a realization about Hanna that he had never suspected during all the time that they had been together that wonderful summer eight years before.
And as the trial progresses, Michael watches Hanna withhold information that could have helped her defense, and then he struggles with himself over whether he should provide that important information that could help her.
THE READER is much more than just a story about lost love and dealing with guilt.
I’m Dan Culberson and this is “Hotshots.”
The Reader – Movie Trailer
Dec 10th
Kate Winslet and Ralph Fiennes star in The Hours director Stephen Daldry’s haunting period drama concerning the relationship between a 15-year-old German boy and a mysterious woman twice his age, and the way that it grows doubly complex when the man reencounters the woman years later and discovers a shocking truth about her past. Based on author Bernhard Schlink’s best-selling novel of the same name, the film opens on the character of Michael Berg (Ralph Fiennes) in middle age — cold, remote, and emotionally withdrawn. It then moves back in time to 1950s Berlin, where ailing teenager Michael (now played by David Kross) has fallen ill with fever, and is discovered in the street by Hanna, a woman in her thirties. After Michael recovers, the two immediately lapse into a torrid affair and Michael falls prey to the confusion of his own burgeoning sexuality. Their liaisons are often marked by Hanna’s request that Michael read to her (hence the title). Later, when Michael returns to Hanna’s flat and finds it deserted, her absence becomes an emotional blow for which he is completely unprepared, and indeed, scarred for life. The film then moves forward in time by eight years. Michael — now a law student — walks into a courtroom and comes across Hanna, one of a series of Nazi prison guards being tried for murderous war crimes during World War II. As he watches her on the witness stand, memories of their past experiences together bring him to the point of realization concerning a startling, long-buried truth about Hanna — and Michael knows that if he divulges this information, it could modify the prison sentence handed out and dramatically alter her fate.
