Tomorrow, I’ll forget it too. Until another ship does not sink. A ship the size of a globe, for example. Frank Visbar’s “Night Over Gothenhaven” caught my attention thanks to the name of a director who is well known to me from such military films as “Dogs, Do You Want to Live Forever?” and “Sharks and Little Fish” that I had seen a few years earlier.
Immediately note the author's handwriting of Visbar, which cannot be confused with any other director. The narrative smoothly develops around the fate of an individual against the backdrop of the Second World War, unobtrusively but strictly consistently revealing the character of the hero through his involvement in difficult life situations, always implying a choice in one direction or another.
The main character is a pretty and rather young girl Maria works on the radio in her native Germany and chastely awaits the return from the front of her husband Kurt, with whom they had been resting on the luxury cruise ship Wilhelm Gustloff before the war (which, in fact, begins the story of the film).
Even then, Maria met officer Kriegsmarine Hans, about whom she seemed to forget, but those on... the war began and Hans was here as it is, and Kurt is far to the east.
I will not disclose further twists and turns of the plot, because I want to say in my review completely different. The film bribed me with a really vital, without any far-fetched hyperbolization, plot. The simple life situation that developed in the life of a simple German girl in 1945 does not seem far from modern realities. On the contrary: the lack of calm and peace and the constant fear that replaces them and the impending threat of the end of everything you once dreamed of and believed in make you perceive events on the screen as something truly real and vital, rather than those “passions” that fill the modern screen.
Maria and her fate: Berlin, East Prussia, Poland, Gothenhaven, “Wilhelm Gustloff”, the people around her (a loyal friend, a general, a French prisoner of war servant, her husband’s parents, Kurt and Hans himself) create on the screen a picture of the real life, pain and suffering of the part of German society that was classified as a civilian population of the Third Reich in early 1945. The apotheosis of all this is the death of a German liner with 6,000 passengers on board, invariably evoking associations with the death of the Soviet "Armenia" in 1941.
Eye for eye, tooth for tooth. No, I don't think that's the moral of this movie. On the screen, we see a simple human story, its beginning and its end. It doesn’t matter who it is, German or Russian. What matters is how people could have allowed this massacre called World War II to take place and what choices everyone made when disaster was already imminent.
7 out of 10