Germany Year Zero, 1948
I watched
Rome, Open City about a week and a half ago, and this film is the third of that series of films.
In Ally-occupied Munich a boy named Edmund (Edmund Moeschke) lives in a multi-family apartment with his adult sister, his soldier brother, and his sick father. The city is in ruins, and the people within it are living desperate lives. In an attempt to support his family, Edmund gets mixed up with various sordid characters and schemes.
The film begins on a down note that persists for the whole film: Edmund has tried to get work digging graves, but when it's discovered that he is underage he is kicked off of the work site and returns home with no pay. But Edmund's helplessness, which at first seems mostly a result of his age, extends to the rest of his family. His father is too sick to work. His brother cannot work because he is not registered with the authorities out of fear of what they would do if they found out that he fought until the very end of the war. His sister is clearly disturbed by multiple people encouraging her into prostitution.
This is a film full of desperation and misery, and Rossellini gives us a true spectrum of characters, some of whom are more innocent, and others of whom still cling to the evils of the Nazi ideology.
Something that I need to think over more was the way that the situation itself (the poverty, the fear, the frustration) seems like it is prime to push people into extremism. But at the same time, this is a culture just coming to the end of a decade of pursuing a political agenda that is extreme. At one point the father, who talks about his service in WW1, says something to the effect of "We just need to admit our mistakes." On the other side is Edmund's former schoolteacher, Henning, a slimy character who constantly gropes Edmund in what to me looked like an overtly sexual way and who still believes in Hitler and his ideas. Edmund also falls in with a gang of teenage (or early 20s?) boys who scam and steal from other citizens. One of them refers to the only girl in the group as "a mattress who sometimes dispenses cigarettes". For every small kindness that Edmund encounters, there is a flood of misery, anxiety, and cruelty.
It is interesting to see the way the the evils of the Nazi behavior and philosophy are so inextricably intertwined with the suffering of all of the characters. For example, there is a pregnant woman whose boyfriend/husband is currently in a POW camp. Edmund's brother, Karl-Heinz, is clearly dealing with some serious trauma from his military service in Russia. There is an interesting push-pull in the film where I both felt bad and did not feel bad for certain characters because of their larger involvement in the Nazi regime.
Much like
Rome, Open City, this is not an easy watch. Edmund's child-like understanding of the world mixes with Henning's influence in the worst possible way. An early sequence in which starved citizens surround a dead horse like scavengers pretty much sets the tone. A bleak watch, and an interesting film to compare to
Rome, Open City.