Of course, with Keira Knightley in the cast, comparisons to “Atonement” are pretty hard to avoid. (The piano in “ The Piano” didn’t have to bear the symbolic burden of the Steinway on display here.) Once it becomes painfully obvious that there's not going to be anything here that you haven’t seen before-especially if you have seen “ Atonement”-most viewers will check out long before the story reaches its messy and rushed conclusion. In other words, we are treated to any number of scenes of people staring longingly out of windows, characters whose previously established behavior changes abruptly the moment that the plot requires it to and too many moments involving a piano given far more symbolic weight that it can possibly bear. It quickly becomes evident that this approach must have been too difficult for Brook, who co-wrote the screenplay with Joe Shrapnel and Anna Waterhouse, and director James Kent (whose “ Testament of Youth” was an infinitely more interesting wartime romantic drama) to pull off, and instead they elected to go the full-on soap opera route. The notion of telling a story centered on relationships in the immediate wake of World War II-with the inescapable tensions between the Germans struggling to make a new life under the watchful eye of the same people who destroyed their city-could have plausibly been developed into an insightful drama. Morgan.” To complicate things further, Freda has been running around secretly with Albert (Jannik Schumann), a young Nazi wannabe who wants to use her connections to do some violence against his city’s intruders. (In a stroke of good fortune, the screenplay also conveniently forgets about this particular plot detail almost as soon as it raises it.) Before long, Rachel is considering running off with Stefan and Freda to a new life but has to figure out how to deal with the morally righteous but somewhat lunkheaded and self-absorbed Lewis, the kind of guy who introduces Rachel to people by saying “This is my wife, Mrs. Finally, on a night when Lewis is once again gone and Rachel finds herself tending to wounds that Stefan acquired when caught up in an out-of-control street protest, grand passions finally arise and the two find themselves on a table indulging in what the beloved namesake of this website, had he reviewed this film, would have almost certainly referred to as “rumpy-pumpy.” Before long, Rachel is almost a new woman-she smiles, she returns to playing the piano after having given it up for years and seems to have forgotten all of her initial and not-entirely-unfounded suspicions about whether or not Stefan was a full-fledged Nazi. Rachel, who is still struggling to process her son's death in a bombing raid a couple of years earlier, is not especially thrilled with the arrangement and while Lewis and Stefan try to make the best of the awkward circumstances, she treats Stefan with barely disguised disdain.Īs time goes by, no pun intended, and Lewis is constantly called away to work, Rachel’s attitude towards Stefan begins to thaw. So much so, in fact, that when he and his wife, Rachel ( Keira Knightley), are sent to live in the lavish mansion that has been “requisitioned” from recent widower Stefan ( Alexander Skarsgard) and his teenaged daughter Freda (Flora Thiemann), he magnanimously offers to let them continue to live there (in the attic, naturally) instead of forcing them off to stay in a refugee camp. One of the men charged with this mission is Lewis Morgan ( Jason Clarke), a recently arrived British captain who, unlike most of his fellow soldiers, tries to treat the locals with some modicum of respect and dignity. The film is set in Hamburg about five months after the Allied victory, as shell-shocked locals stumble through the piles of rubble that used to be their city and Allied troops try to maintain some semblance of order while searching for any remaining Nazi loyalists.
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