Gert Thiele and Dorothea Vick have already met as an acting tandem in the film “Girls in Uniform”, from which LGBT themes in cinema are not unreasonably counted. But if the earlier film depicted the attraction of a teenage girl to an older teacher, then Anna and Elizabeth is an example of a relationship inversion. A hopeless disabled woman, who lost the ability to walk, reaches, blindly believing in the miracle of healing, to a young girl who acquired the status of a miracle healer in the district, almost a saint, after two cases of either supernatural or accidental due to a number of coincidences of gaining health by other heroes.
This film is gloomy, with its gothic almost sinister entourage, it resembles the best tapes of “silent” German expressionism: the curved and at the same time broken contours of the village where the action takes place, the emphasis on expressive details in the appearance and behavior of the characters (Vic plays primarily plastically, not psychologically, hands and eyes here “talk” more than speech itself), etc. In other words, the film rather resembles not sound, but voiced silent, although there is plenty of dialogue. Nevertheless, the content of conversations is not so important, although it is worth paying attention to the discussion of the problems of the miracle (what is it? why does it happen to some and not to others? what is its source?), as what is shown on the screen without the help of words, and sometimes in spite of them.
It is important to pay attention to the following context. The director successfully demonstrates the mechanism of the “crowd instinct”: how there is a rumor about a holy girl, how people forget about critical thinking, blindly trusting the simplest version of what is happening. Finally, how faith in a miracle can lead not to salvation, but to death. In light of the inexorable course of the political events of that time, it is very important to understand that Wiesbar records what is in the air of the whole of Germany, which has not recovered from the consequences of the defeat in the First World War and, perhaps, is waiting for the same simple solution of all problems at once from the force that can offer it. Well, what happened in Germany in the early 1930s, you should not repeat again, the director very accurately captured and recorded this zeitgeist in the film, which seemed very far from political issues.
7 out of 10