WOMEN IN LOVE
AIMEE & JAGUAR
Directed by Max Farberbock
Screenplay by Farberbock and Rona Munro from the book by Erica Fischer
With Maria Schrader, Juliane Kohler
Plan B NR 125min
Aimee & Jaguar is also a true story of racial intolerance and people rising above it, but here the stakes are even higher and the ending less uplifting. We're in Berlin in the closing months of WWII, with sirens wailing and bombs blowing neighborhoods to rubble, and Jews being herded into trucks for concentration camps, while in the concert halls and the hotel bars life tries to struggle along with a semblance of normalcy.
Felice Schragenheim (Maria Schrader) is a beautiful, intelligent, free-spirited girl with two serious strikes against her under the circumstances: she's a lesbian, and she's a Jew. She conceals these Nazi-unfriendly traits, and works in the belly of the beast, as the trusted secretary of the editor of a Nazi newspaper. Lilly Wust (Juliane KF6hler) is the lonely, flibberty-gibbet wife of a German officer, a = blonde blue-eyed mother of four blonde blue-eyed sons, who cheats on her husband to reassure herself while he's at the front.
Felice seduces Lily for fun. Frau Wust has boasted to her nanny Ilse (Johanna Wokalek), Felice's lover, that she can smell a Jew. When they meet, Felice proffers a perfumed wrist for her to sniff. "Lovely," says Lily. "It's French, isn't it?"
But what starts as sport becomes achingly serious. They fall in love. There's not much sex, but what there is is intense and beautiful.
Lily is a sweet woman who is not as shallow as circumstances have made her, but her naivete leads her to make a couple of terrible blunders. As the movie begins and ends, she is an old woman remembering. The real Lily Wust still lives in Berlin.
Both actresses are superb. The story is sometimes confusing, and at two hours plus it runs to fat, but it's well worth while.
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