A previous reviewer couldn't recommend the film too highly and said you owe it to yourself to see this.
I can't go along with that.
A lot of British people have tried to cheer themselves up with the thought that Hitlerism could never have taken root in Britain, because we're all so jolly decent and we'd never have put up with Onkel Adi.
This film does a pretty good job of saying "Bull***t!" to that idea. Collaborating with the occupying power is a fairly obvious strategy for people who want a quiet life, or hope for advancement in the new society, because they don't believe that the occupation will be defeated.
And if state-managed news media tell you only what they want you to hear, and portray things in an extremely odd light, then it's not surprising that people start to believe this stuff and spout it themselves.
The basic narrative device is to follow the adventures of an Irish nurse who claims to have little experience of or interest in politics. She loses her friends to an attack by the resistance partisans, signs up, after some agonising, to nurse with the Nazi Action Brigade, and then has some experiences which ought to open her eyes to the immoral horror of Nazism. It's a pretty useful device: she gets to see both sides of things, so the audience does too. But we don't find out, really, what she thinks of these things: the film-makers obviously intend the audience to draw their own conclusions.
The message of this film is uncompromisingly bleak. Men and women are capable of much worse than they think; fascism is a disease so virulent that one needs to adopt some of its own methods to have a chance of defeating it, and very few people are immune to its temptations (especially when agreement makes for a much less uncomfortable life).
It's a very earnest film, but it isn't very interesting dramatically. Showing that ordinary people are susceptible requires that the events be fairly routine (in context), otherwise the audience can put the behaviour of which they would obviously disapprove down to the effects of special circumstances. That's honest, but drab, ordinary lives tend to make for drab, ordinary stories, and this is no exception.
I'd recommend watching it, but don't expect it to be the highlight of your viewing week.
I can't go along with that.
A lot of British people have tried to cheer themselves up with the thought that Hitlerism could never have taken root in Britain, because we're all so jolly decent and we'd never have put up with Onkel Adi.
This film does a pretty good job of saying "Bull***t!" to that idea. Collaborating with the occupying power is a fairly obvious strategy for people who want a quiet life, or hope for advancement in the new society, because they don't believe that the occupation will be defeated.
And if state-managed news media tell you only what they want you to hear, and portray things in an extremely odd light, then it's not surprising that people start to believe this stuff and spout it themselves.
The basic narrative device is to follow the adventures of an Irish nurse who claims to have little experience of or interest in politics. She loses her friends to an attack by the resistance partisans, signs up, after some agonising, to nurse with the Nazi Action Brigade, and then has some experiences which ought to open her eyes to the immoral horror of Nazism. It's a pretty useful device: she gets to see both sides of things, so the audience does too. But we don't find out, really, what she thinks of these things: the film-makers obviously intend the audience to draw their own conclusions.
The message of this film is uncompromisingly bleak. Men and women are capable of much worse than they think; fascism is a disease so virulent that one needs to adopt some of its own methods to have a chance of defeating it, and very few people are immune to its temptations (especially when agreement makes for a much less uncomfortable life).
It's a very earnest film, but it isn't very interesting dramatically. Showing that ordinary people are susceptible requires that the events be fairly routine (in context), otherwise the audience can put the behaviour of which they would obviously disapprove down to the effects of special circumstances. That's honest, but drab, ordinary lives tend to make for drab, ordinary stories, and this is no exception.
I'd recommend watching it, but don't expect it to be the highlight of your viewing week.