Dramatising the true story of a courageous anti-Nazi resistance activist during World War II, German director Andreas Dresen makes his fifth visit to the Berlinale this week with his latest Golden Bear contender, From Hilde, With Love. The story’s heroine is Hilde Coppi, born Betti Gertrud Käthe Hilda Rake in 1909, an unassuming Berlin insurance clerk who dared to take a high-risk stand against Hitler’s brutal regime. Packaged in fairly straight biopic terms, this is an unusually conventional work from Dresen, a minor statement by a major German film-maker. Even so, classy production values and star billing for Liv Lisa Fries of Babylon Berlin fame should help boost marquee appeal and sales interest following its festival world premiere this week. Domestic theatrical release is planned for October.
Growing up in Communist East Germany, Dresen first learned about Hilde’s heroic anti-fascist exploits in school. Only in later life did he look beyond simplistic propaganda accounts from both sides of the Cold War, finding a more timeless human story beneath. Contemporary, universal resonance is part of his mission statement in From Hilde, With Love, for commendable reasons. The far-right AfD party is currently reminding Germany of its Nazi past, after all. Globally, the issue of totalitarian regimes jailing, torturing and killing innocent young idealists remains painfully relevant today, from freedom martyrs like Mahsa Amini in Iran to Alexei Navalny’s deeply suspicious death this week in Putin’s Russia.
From Hilde, With Love opens in Berlin in the late summer of 1942. Hilde (Fries), recently married and heavily pregnant, is arrested by Gestapo officers and taken into custody for interrogation. Together with her husband Hans (Johannes Hegemann) and dozens of their friends, Hilde is charged with belonging to the anti-Nazi resistance moment later dubbed the “Rote Kapelle” (Red Orchestra), a name calculated to smear various loosely linked left-leaning, liberal and Communist groups as a formal network of Moscow-controlled spies.
Mostly young bohemians, artists and pacifists, the group members are accused of sending and receiving illegal radio signals, passing on comforting messages from captured German soldiers to their families, distributing anti-war pamphlets, and posting satirical stickers mocking the crude anti-Soviet, anti-Semitic propaganda of Josef Goebbels. Minor crimes, but enough to earn most of them the death penalty as dangerous left-wing subversives. Hilde is sent to a women’s prison in East Berlin, where she gives birth to a baby boy, Hans Jr. Facing likely execution, she appeals for clemency as a new mother with no criminal record, a petition that goes all the way to Hitler himself.
Fries delivers a solid star performance here, covering the full emotional spectrum, often working with minimal dialogue. But she is not always well served by a spare screenplay and muted direction. By sticking within respectful bio-pic rules, Dresen and screenwriter Laila Stieler have only the dry facts of Hilde’s real life to work with here, a story that many Germans and Nazi-era historians will already know. To shake things up a little, they scramble the timeline, cross-cutting restlessly between their heroine’s grim months in jail and the back story of her romance with Hans, which blossoms over a giddy endless summer of picnics, parties and skinny-dipping swims in the lakes around Berlin. This non-linear treatment is effective at varying the tone, but repetitive and confusing at times.
Dresen makes a concerted effort to avoid the clichéd dramatic conventions of most Nazi-era stories. There are no swastika flags, no goose-stepping military parades, no stirring heroics or genocidal monsters here, just young activists with relatable flaws and keen sexual appetites, plus a background chorus of state functionaries tasked with capturing them. The banality of evil is indelibly part of this process, of course, but From Hilde, With Love is less interested in specific examples of villainy than in totalitarian systems that corrupt everyone caught up in them, from quietly empathetic prison guards to kindly pastors to judges tasked with lending a fig leaf of legal legitimacy to the mass murder of political dissidents.
Production design is similarly understated, with minimal period props or music. Clothes and hairstyles border on the anachronistic, often speaking to the 21st century as much as the 1940s. But while Dresen’s cool-headed universalist approach makes sense intellectually, it does not make for great cinema. From Hilde, With Love sets out to methodically underplay both the historial context and stirring drama in Hilde’s story, and succeeds all too well. The end result is an unusually flat and conventional work from the director of prickly, droll, emotionally raw films like Grill Point (2002), Stopped on Track (2011) and Gundermann (2018). Over two long hours, a harrowing true story of inspirational heroism, tragedy and injustice settles into deluxe soap opera mode.
Only in a handful of scenes does Dresen allow a little sunshine and joy to alleviate this low-voltage glumfest. One stand-out sequence, in which a romantically intoxicated Hilde and Hans whirl around a lakeside picnic in a motorcycle and sidecar to a lush orchestral waltz, is a sublime interlude, lyrical and magical but all too brief. A poetic burst of voice-over from Hilde’s real-life son Hans Coppi Jr., seen as a baby in the film, now an 81-year-old historian, also serves as a moving coda. Bridging fact and fiction, past and present, this closing flourish is an inspired addition, but again too sparingly deployed. Dresen is a fine film-maker, and Hilde’s story is worthy of the big screen treatment, but this tasteful cinematic tribute feels like a mild rebuke to fascists everywhere when it should have landed like a punch in the gut.
Director: Andreas Dresen
Screenwriter: Laila Stieler
Cast: Liv Lisa Fries, Johannes Hegemann, Lisa Wagner, Alexander Scheer, Emma Bading, Lisa Hrdina
Cinematography: Judith Kaufmann
Editing: Jörg Hauschild
Production design: Susanne Hopf
Costumes: Birgitt Kilian
Producers: Claudia Steffen, Christoph Friedel, Prof. Regina Ziegler
Production company: Pandora Film Produktion (Germany)
World sales: Beta Cinema
Venue: Berlinale (Competition)
In German
124 minutes
