old-age: The Reader

The Reader

A risible movie with great makeup.

It is very long time since I saw a film – or at least one with any pretensions – with two such uninvolving main characters or such a dumb plot: Hanna Schmitz (Kate Winslet), a former concentration camp guard admits to mass murder because she is too embarrassed to reveal that she is illiterate and therefore could not have written the document produced as evidence against her.

Meanwhile Michael Berg, a German lawyer with a broken marriage who had a brief affair with Hannah twenty years previously while he was still at school and she was in her mid-thirties, has only one relationship – recording tapes of novels and sending them to Hannah in prison and when she learns to write he doesn’t reply to her letters.

In 1988, the prison’s governor seeks his help in arranging for Hannah’s forthcoming release: reluctantly he agrees to sponsor Hannah and finds her accomodation and a job and visits her a week before she is due to be released but can’t relate to her – that night she commits suicide in her cell.

Seven years later he decides that occasional casual sex is not enough and finally seeks to form a relationship with his daughter.

Susanne Lothar played Michael’s mother; Lena Olin played both Rose Mather, a concentration camp survivor who testified at Hannah’s trial in 1966 and Rose’s daughter Ilana in 1990.

After I saw the film, I came away thinking it must have been butchered to be that bad so I read the book – I wish I hadn’t bothered.

The makeup

Ivana Primorac was the hair & makeup designer; Matthew Smith was the prosthetic makeup designer; Pauline Fowler was the prosthetic makeup supervisor; Linda Melazzo was Kate Winslet’s makeup artist.