LORE

The question of whether or not cinema had much new to say about the Second World War was thoroughly put to bed by Quentin Tarantino’s brilliant, spellcheck-confusing Inglourious Basterds. No more after that, surely!

Following decades of films covering the dramatic, tragic, fictional and blackly comical, Tarantino simultaneously highlighted the horror while going bombastically overboard, by just plain blowing up Hitler – and most of the rest of the Nazi party for that matter – in a huge conflagration in a cinema.

It’s safe to say that Australian director Cate Shortland doesn’t go that far in Lore, her second feature after 2004’s Somersault. She tackles something almost nastier: the unnerving subject of the children of the Nazis. What was it like being a golden child one minute, and on the wrong side of a crumbling regime the next? And what does it mean for the audience to walk that awkward line between vilification and sympathy?

Blond, beautiful and young, Shortland’s children are like an inverted Family Von Trapp. An edgy mother snaps, while the militant father returns from the end of the war shrouded in panic, rather than glory. It’s fascinating how quickly your feelings about them are tinged black by their affiliations. Everything they do, from grieving to sex, seems alien and faintly evil.

When they attempt to flee the Allies, the father’s sensible, if sad, decision to shoot the family dog behind the children’s backs seems positively monstrous.

But this isn’t the Family Von Trapp, and there are no Swiss mountains for them to run away to. When both parents are taken off by the Allies, eldest daughter Lore (Saskia Rosendahl) is instructed to take her four small siblings on the train to her grandmother. But the railway has been destroyed and she must shepherd them hundreds of miles across land populated with unfriendly locals.

Shortland’s film simmers with tension. The landscape, beautiful and wild, seems almost to hiss at the children as they pass. Lore tries and fails to acquire food with the limited funds left by their parents, but her naivety, coupled with her innate sense of superiority, spells disaster – until she relies on Jewish refugee Thomas (Kai Malina) for help.

That the children’s arduous journey acts as the Nazi counterpart to The Sound Of Music makes it all the harder to watch. These aren’t Disney kids, ready to throw over their background for the sake of everyone getting along, nor, as tragic later scenes show, is there a happy ending that can gloss over the fact that these children are as much victims of war as anyone else.

Lore’s slow wake-up call about the beliefs she grew up with makes fascinating viewing. The slow pace of this film might fail to draw everyone in, but it does leave you with plenty to think on.