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The Herefordshire Borderlines Film Festival continues and the night before last we saw The Book Thief. For someone like me, an unregenerate book addict brought up in the menacing shadow of the Second World War, it is almost impossible to imagine a better theme for a film than this brings to the screen.
A young adopted girl with a thirst for reading steals a book from a pile left smouldering after a Nazi parade. This is a key episode whose tension resonates throughout the film.
My childhood nightmares were of being chased by the Gestapo. My idea of bliss was a book under the sheets with a torch.
‘Not an unbiased critic of this film, then,’ you think?
No, I’m not. But I believe its power and sensitivity will capture the hearts of many who have no special love for books or experience of war’s shadow.
It deals with the potential we all have for both the dark and the light: the savagery of the Kristallnacht contrasted with the quiet heroism of a family shielding a fugitive.
When Liebel, the schoolgirl played by Sophie Nélisse, plunges in search of her lost friend, the fugitive, into a straggling column of Jewish families being herded to the camps, she is ferociously thrown out of the way. Again she rushes back and again, even more harshly, she is thrown onto the pavement at the side, shaken and bleeding.
Later her adoptive father asks her, ‘Why did you do that, Liesel?’
‘I’m a person,’ she replies. ‘That’s what people do.’
The film is rich in such evocative moments.
Both Geoffrey Rush, of The King’s Speech, as this father, and Emily Watson as the mother, are pitch perfect in their performances as is Sophie also.
This is a moving and uplifting experience that conveys our potential for good and the power of art and literature to foster that, which is why tyrants have always feared artistic freedom and the power of the written word.
Definitely a film to catch.
Below is the flier they gave out at the screening. It’s two hours and eleven minutes long though! I think the rest of it is more accurate.
Everybody Means Something 