Forbidden

In Berlin in the early 1940s, romance is forbidden between the young countess who is studying veterinary medicine and a young man she meets at the home of a former professor. But they fall in love. She gets involved in helping Jews escape from the Nazis. All get out of Berlin except the young man. There is a room in her apartment where he can't be seen through the windows and a chest converted into a sofa where she and her brothers played hide-and-seek as children. This real life hide-and-seek game has high stakes. The movie is said to be based on a true story.

Ok, so I've always been a little underwhelmed by Jacqueline Bisset and it is quite hard to imagine Peter "Grouty" Vaughan as a Nazi major, but once I'd got my head around that this is actually quite a decent telling of a supposedly true story from WWII. The Countess "Nina" (JB) is increasingly concerned by the rise of the Third Reich and it's arbitrary and brutal treatment of the Jewish population, and so under the guise of her status as a student at vet school, she enrols with the resistance and starts to help the persecuted escape. This is when she encounters "Fritz" (Jürgen Prochnow) whom she takes into her large apartment. For the moment he is in no danger, but as she meets his formidable mother (Irene Worth) the pfennig starts to drop - peril is very near and it's only a matter of time before they are shipped off to a labour camp. His mother refuses to take any refuge, but convinces her son to remain with the Countess in the hope that she can get him away. With the authorities getting ever more suspicious and "Fritz" still unaware of the Countess's extra-curricular activities, the pressure to help ever-more people escape puts everyone at grave risk and her title will avail her nothing should she be caught by the Gestapo (or "rescued" by the Soviets!). There is something of the theatrical to this presentation and that works well at illustrating a sense of the increasingly claustrophobic existence lived by both - but especially "Fritz", as any semblance of legal process was abandoned and it became open season on communities who were as likely to turn on each other as to be reported by observant strangers. That pace accumulates quite effectively once we've established the characterisations and the denouement is anything but risk free - but the acting. Sorry, but neither Bisset nor Prochnow really gel together very compellingly and there isn't enough of Worth for her to impact much - and that's a shame as the tale from the perspective of the older and frankly incredulous woman is worth a little more development. This is also another film that demonstrates the collaboration of the "neutral" Swedes - in this case, their church - in trying to help at no small risk to themselves, and with just a little more convincing casting could have been much better. Worth a look, though.