Stories of German resistance to the Third Reich have variously featured Tom Cruise, Julia Jentsch and Cillian Murphy performing daredevil deeds. From the outset, Andreas Dresen’s follow-up to Rabiye Kurnaz vs George W Bush offers a different, steely kind of heroism.
Long before we hear the real-life narration of the historian Hans Coppi jnr, From Hilde, with Love has re-created his activist parents to powerful, elegiac effect. Coppi jnr was a baby when he was handed to his grandmother at the gates of Barnimstrasse women’s prison following the execution of his Communist mother and father.
A prison guard, Anneliese Kühn (Lisa Wagner), wrote a letter to allow his condemned mother to continue breastfeeding. But Adolf Hitler refused the request for clemency.
The Coppis and their like-minded comrades in the Red Orchestra – a catch-all term the internal police used to denote any dissenters – were quiet idealists learning to tap Morse code and listening in to Voice of Russia for news of German POWs against the backdrop of the crumbling Reich.
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Laila Stieler’s screenplay characterises the couple as full-blooded, carnal, spirited people, given to neither grand pontification nor cinematic heroism. They giddily run away after posting pro-Soviet political slogans at night. They fall madly in love, their sexual encounters framed as domestic acts of defiance. It’s an Austen-worthy coupling.
Editor Jörg Hauschild’s temporal jumps introduce Hilde as a Miss Lonelyhearts transformed by romance, defiance and carnality. Their summery encounters, gorgeously shot by the cinematographer Judith Kaufmann, are starkly counterpointed by their wretched capture and incarceration.
Hilde tenderly cares for the baby she gives birth to in jail, devastated by the loss of her husband and knowing her stay can end only with death by guillotine. Hilde Coppi, played with fragile depth by Liv Lisa Fries, is a cinematic portrait for the ages.
In cinemas from Friday, June 27th
