Lore

Lore

MA15+, 109mins

Directed by Cate Shortland

In the dying days of WWII, a mother to a seemingly affluent family with a husband whose supposedly still away at war fighting for the Third Reich, tells her five children that they must leave and seek refuge with their grandmother. As word of Hitler’s death filters across the European landscape, the mother departs her children to hand herself in to the new occupying forces and leaves the teenage Hannelore (Saskia Rosendahl in a fabulous debut performance) in charge. As they struggle to make their way across a divided nation that is crumbling around them, the children must join forces with a Jewish boy who makes Hannelore confront the prejudices that she and her siblings have been taught to adhere to for as long as they can possibly remember.

Despite its German setting and language, Lore is very much an Australian production. Co-produced with Germany as well as the United Kingdom, Lore comes with an international prestige that should surprise audiences unaware of its background. Directed and co-written by Cate Shortland (Somersault), and based on a novella, The Dark Room, by the British-born Rachel Seiffert – herself the daughter of Australian and German descent – Lore’s behind-the-scenes crafts roster is full of incredibly talented local artists who give the film a look and taut vibrancy that places it firmly amongst some of the most evocative and powerful films about WWII of recent years.

Shortland is a director with a distinctive knack for navigating the world of tricky and unfamiliar territory. Whether it’s a young woman grappling with the power and consequences of her burgeoning sexuality in Somersault, a police detective traumatised by an unsolved crime in the ABC telemovie The Silence, or a girl who finds the only life she’s ever known crumbling around her in Lore. This is her first directorial credit in some six years, but one gets the sense that she was perfecting the scope needed to craft a film such as this, rather than twiddling her thumbs waiting for a project to fall her way. Shortland excels in giving audiences a look at WWII from a decidedly unique, and altogether different angle. She eschues many of the typical holocaust imagery as a means of getting inside the mind of these children who have never had to be as abruptly confronted with their leader’s methods as they are during their cross-country journey. At a feeding hall one elderly lady says she believes photographs of mounds of dead bodies inside a concentration camp are American propaganda. It’s this guilty naïveté, this brainwashed indoctrination that makes the film, and especially the character of Lore, so rich and fascinating.

Much of the film’s success must go to cinematographer Adam Arkapaw (Animal Kingdom, Snowtown), editor Veronika Jenet (The Piano), and score composer Max Richter. The look of the film is bathed in a veil of dark beauty that accentuates the lush greens and browns of the German woods, Lore is lit in such a manner by Arkapaw that one can instantly notice the inspiration for the Brothers Grimm fairytales. As Richter’s fantastic, melodic score echoes across the soundtrack as if rebounding around the children, it’s a perfect combination. Jenet’s editing refuses to go for easy war film histrionics, and instead remain subtle. The costume design of Stefanie Bieker must also be commended, appropriately mending the characters’ clothes to their fragile state, always letting fabric tears and muddy stains chart the seemingly hopeless terrain of their journey.

At 109 minutes, Lore thankfully avoids the brutish pomp of other WWII films – notably recent Polish production, In Darkness, which ran a bloated typical two and a half hours – and instead tells its story with efficiency. For all the success that the film finds throughout that runtime, it’s perhaps in the final scenes where Shortland’s most intriguing concept arises. As a frustrated Hannelore smashes an important part of her childhood away, she gradually learns to accept – as millions surely did in 1945 and beyond – that their lives would literally never be the same. Lore will always be the child of Nazi parents and the rhetoric that she and her siblings were lead to believe right from birth will never leave their memory. These are people whose relatives in this modern day and age have probably grown up with little knowledge of what went on. The haunting daze of the war infecting the very psyche of a globe and, in this case, these unfortunate children who the film neither condemns nor views with rose-tinted glasses. It’s this mature take on the subject matter that makes Lore the finest Australian film of the year.

Lore is in limited release from September 20 through Transmission Films.