![the reader book the reader book](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/zyUi-E1KoQw/maxresdefault.jpg)
The reader book trial#
A sympathetic teacher, Professor Rohl (played by Bruno Ganz, who brings to this impeccable liberal figure a whiff of his Hitler in Downfall) launches a seminar for bright pupils to scrutinise the issues of guilt and crimes against humanity and takes them to a trial in a nearby town. The second chapter unfolds in 1966 when Michael is a law student at Heidelberg, still yearning for Hanna. This gives her an official, military look. What is she avoiding? The second is the emphasis placed on her uniform as a public transport employee. First, there is Hanna's reluctance to look at any text, be it a book, a travel brochure or a menu, or to write anything. But there are carefully planted clues to the tale's subsequent surprises. If you left the film after 45 minutes at the point when Hanna mysteriously disappears from Michael's life, and were unacquainted with the novel, you'd have thought it a wistful rite of passage, rather like Summer of '42 or The Graduate. The eroticism of reading brings to mind Michel Deville's La Lectrice, and the lovers' activities at their trysts complement each other. In return she asks him to read to her before and after sex, and he regales her with The Odyssey, Huckleberry Finn, War and Peace and (a book she thinks disgusting) Lady Chatterley's Lover. She provides his sexual initiation and sentimental education in the manner of such celebrated Continental novels as Raymond Radiguet's Le Diable au corps. In the first chapter, set in 1958, the 15-year-old Michael (David Kross) meets the voluptuous Hanna Schmitz (Kate Winslet), a kindly tram conductress more than twice his age.
The reader book movie#
The movie is in three sections, with a couple of codas. Born in Neustadt, Germany in 1944, the gifted son of a liberal intellectual, Berg is a successful lawyer who reviews his troubled life from the perspective of 1995 Berlin, and it's immediately clear that his experiences have left him secretive, inward-looking, emotionally stunted in a way that recalls the form and moral tenor of the Losey-Pinter film of The Go-Between. So a provocative statement of some sort is being made by casting him as Michael Berg, the innocent narrator of The Reader. Ralph Fiennes made an unforgettable impression as Amon Goeth, the demonic commandant of the Plaszow forced labour camp in Schindler's List, the most widely shown movie on the Holocaust.
![the reader book the reader book](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/-tHhEK8GCBg/maxresdefault_live.jpg)
![the reader book the reader book](https://images.forwardcdn.com/image/1300x/center/images/cropped/fall-books-1475159624.jpg)
Since then, there has been an unending stream of Holocaust movies (nearly 300 are dealt with in the third edition of Indelible Shadows: Film and the Holocaust, Annette Insdorf's standard work on the subject), ranging in character and quality from scrupulous documentaries like Claude Lanzmann's Shoah and Alain Resnais's Night and Fog to, for me personally, the two most offensive, Liliana Cavani's near-pornographic The Night Porter and Roberto Benigni's sickly Oscar-winning Life is Beautiful.