Bold

The subtitle of Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet’s first feature, from 1965, “Only Violence Helps Where Violence Reigns,” suggests the fierce political program evoked by their rigorous aesthetic. The pretext of the film, set in Cologne, is Heinrich Böll’s novel “Billiards at Half Past Nine,” which they strip down to a handful of stark events and film with a confrontational angularity akin to Bartók’s music that adorns the soundtrack. The subtlest of cues accompany the story’s complex flashbacks. The middle-aged Robert Fähmel tells a young hotel bellhop of persecutions under the Third Reich; his elderly father, Heinrich, an architect famed for a local abbey, recalls the militarism of the First World War, when his wife, Johanna, incurred trouble for insulting the Kaiser. A third-generation Fähmel is considering architecture, just as the exiled brother of Robert’s late wife, returns, only to be met by their former torturer, now a West German official taking part in a celebratory parade of war veterans. Straub and Huillet make the layers of history live in the present tense, which they judge severely. The tamped-down acting and the spare, tense visual rhetoric suggest a state of moral crisis as well as the response—as much in style as in substance—that it demands.

影片根据真人真事改编，讲述一段发生在战火下的女同爱情故事。1943年的柏林，正是第二次世界大战纳粹时期。已婚的莉莉（茱莉安·柯勒 Juliane K?hler饰）一如既往的过着毫无激情的生活，直到在一次音乐会上结识了犹太女子菲利斯（玛丽亚· 施拉德 Maria Schrader饰饰），一股激情四射的爱火被瞬间点燃了。她们互唤对方昵称艾米和加古娅，彼此深爱着对方。菲利斯一直在为反纳粹组织搜集资料，直到1944年的一天，被纳粹残害早逝。战火下的爱情，谁又能逃过生离死别。 　　当真爱超越了种族与性别，是否真的存在天堂般美好的伊甸园？