Racial Tragicomedy The beginning of the forties, the German rural hinterland. The men went to war, women, old people remained in the villages, and Poles brought from the east for rural work. A local bucolist idyll, lightly decorated for order with swastikas, collapses after a scandal - the owner of a vegetable store entered into a love affair with a Pole working next door. At once, half a dozen laws were violated, both unwritten - after all, the husband at the front, and clearly prescribed by the latest racial legislation - for the connection of an Aryan woman with a subhuman Aryan - concentration camp, to a subhuman - hanging.
It is difficult to clearly define this little-known film Wajda. Most likely, the concept of tragicomedy fits here. The first half of the film is romantic, dedicated to the vicissitudes of love, looks rather vague. It is felt that the director is unfamiliar with the description of love stories and sweet pleasures of lovers, and the whole first part is just a tip to the second – half-farcical, with the ridiculous attempts of local rural Gestapo, in principle, people, to hush up the scandal, hastily “arising” Polish Romeo. Grimaces, grimaces, uniforms funny looking on the village mudslides, an attempt to measure the skull of the defendant and the stupefaction of the local doctor, who for the first time has to face a racial miracle-science, surprise when the Pole refuses to classify himself as a “superior race”, confused preparations for the subsequent execution, possibly the first in a long time in the district, problems with the rope and executioner, who urgently have to look for.
The moral of “Love” is simple – inhuman and absurd laws disfigure ordinary people, who, however, shrivel out of an innate inclination to order fulfill them and obey the absurd morality dictated by half-crazy power. However, the law is the law, it is necessary, clamping, to perform unpleasant formalities in order to settle again comfortably in the Kafkaesque grotesque, forgetting and covering with earth doubts and unpleasant experiences.
The behavior of a common man in a totalitarian society, forcing him to come to terms with the ordinaryity of lies, denunciation and betrayal has long interested Vajda and is reflected in his paintings. This theme is explored in nature and in “Love in Germany”, which is not so much about love as about the simplicity and everydayness of evil, quickly sprouting from human souls.
8 out of 10