I just saw this film at the Camera Cinema Club in San Jose. This is an immensely complicated film about the children of an SS officer and war criminal. The father disappears. The mother gives herself over to the Americans, and the children (aged 15 down to 7 months) are left to fend for themselves and make a 500km trip to their grandmother's in Hamburg. Germany is in ruins. People are starving and sick. They deny the Holocaust and mourn their dead leader who committed suicide in a bunker. Throughout it all, the 15-year-old lead character Lore must somehow get her siblings to grandma's house while slogging through the chaos of the failed Third Reich.

As I said, it's immensely complicated. It feels like a slice of life even if it is fiction. The cinematography is excellent. The lead actress, all of 19 in real life, is obviously very talented. I gave the film a 7 out of 10 because it's a bit too disjointed for my tastes, but perhaps that's an effective way to portray Germany's disarray at the end of the war.

Lore is neither a denial of the Holocaust nor a sop of sympathy to surviving Germans. Instead, this is a film that treats, often very subtly and wordlessly, the terrible ambiguities and uncertainties of a situation we have learned to understand as completely black and white and transparent. It also deals with deeply diseased family relationships as a source for genocidal thinking. One of the main points of the narrative is that the teenager Lore discovers that her father was a genocidal war criminal. The film handles this discovery wordlessly. But there is a very explicit set of gestures that explain precisely what she has seen: she first stands in a crowd of Germans forced by the Allies to confront photographs of mass murder in exchange for food (this is mentioned very briefly in an aside by an unknown character), then she notices her father in uniform in one of the photographs of mass murder; she touches the photograph, and the glue backing it adheres to her fingers. Later she tries to remove the traces of glue from her hand. She returns and removes the part of the picture where her father is standing. Because the film is wordless on this point, the viewer doesn't know whether this is because she wants to keep the photograph to remind herself of her father's role in the atrocities or to deny his guilt. But subsequently her younger brother exhibits a treasured image of their father in that same uniform and boasts that "Vati" (Daddy) is out fighting in Belarus (the site of many atrocities). Lore somehow acquires that photograph as well, and we see her put the two images of Vati in uniform together and bury them under mud and grass. That's how this film works, and by working this way, it manages to reveal the painfully mixed and contradictory motivations all real human beings have. It interests me that some viewers are not able to follow a narrative given in images.

It is the dynamic between Lore and her parents that I think is a key element to this film, and it has to do with how young people become genocidal, and what might make them break with their psychological training. There is an extraordinarily ugly relationship between the parents and between the parents and the children. It was part of the ideology of Nazi Germany to reward German women with medals for producing as many children as possible. In other words, it is entirely possible that a woman like Lore's mother (a fanatic lover of Hitler) would produce a brood of five solely in service of the Fuehrer. Her husband (whom she also seems to loathe for what she calls his cowardice in abandoning the family and the cause) is just a prosthetic husband. She deeply jealous of Lore for her beauty and her budding sexuality, and in the scenes we watch, she treats her children as inept servants. When Lore shuts her younger brother up in a cabinet and vilifies him in the cruelest terms possible for stealing food (when he is hungry), one understands that she is following the example of her own parents' authoritarian methods. Cruelty, a harsh authoritarian morality, and a lack of loving kindness were the daily bread of that household; this is reflected in Lore's behavior as "mother" to her siblings.

When the mother leaves the family, it is not for inexplicable reasons, as one reviewer implied. We see that the parents are both implicated in the crimes of the war, because they go to the length of destroying their library and documents. The parents are clearly thinking about Allied revenge (when the mother tells Lore that the Allies kill babies, and that's why the mother can't take her nursing infant with her, the viewer doesn't know whether or not she believes this herself). We know why the mother leaves, but not where she goes. She says she is turning herself in, but she may be fleeing to a safe house and taking up a new identity. The children would keep her from escaping her old identity, so they have to be jettisoned.

In the amazing scene toward the end of the film when the grandmother (also -- surprise -- a strict authoritarian parent) chastises Lore's surviving younger brother for eating without the proper table manners, Lore finally makes a break with her upbringing. She shows us that she recognizes the hypocrisy and lies of her parents' generation by intentionally eating "like an animal" in support of her brother, spilling milk on the table and lapping it from her hands. And then she breaks all the little kitschy statuettes, including the little deer.

And on the subject of the Jewish helper -- yes, his identity is ambiguous. But the fact that he is a camp survivor is made clear from his tattoo. That he has false papers is an important point; the regime was all about telling people who they were. When Lore understands that he is a Jew, she immediately tries to put him into the category "Jew" she has been taught: parasite, lecher. But he breaks out of those categories. He refuses to be the person she frames him to be. The fact that we as viewers are anxious to have his identity defined through "papers" puts us unhappily into the same position as the Nazis.

On the whole, this film could disappoint some viewers by not maintaining traditional story structure or temporal structure, by leaving significant things unsaid and unexplained, by avoiding some of the traditional scenes of war films (destroyed cities, fire-fights), by depicting American soldiers in a less than heroic or even congenial way. But if you are a film viewer with patience for non-mainstream filmmaking, this is a profound and beautiful (though sometimes brutal) look at disease.

"Lor"e was the entry from Austria for the category of Best Foreign Language Film for the 85th Academy Awards in 2013, though it was not recognized as one of the final nominees. While there were some aspects of the film I liked, the overall package wasn't especially strong and perhaps this is why the film did not receive a nomination.

When the film begins in 1945, the Nazi government is toppling. This is impacting one particular family in the movie, the Dresslers. Apparently the parents were war criminals—though exactly what they did is never really discussed in the film. All you know is that the mother and father are gone and the oldest child, Lore (Saskia Rosendahl), has been told by her mother to get herself and her siblings to their grandmother's house near Hamburg. Considering that they have no money, they are in the far eastern portion of Germany (or perhaps in Poland) and want to travel hundreds of miles to the west as well as Lore appearing to be about 15, this is a very daunting task. Most of the film consists of the children scrounging for food and scheming to make their way to safety and shelter. Eventually, however, Lore becomes disillusioned and their reunion with Grandma isn't so happy after all and the film ends.

There is so much about this film that seems unanswered and vague. Who, exactly, the man was who teamed up with them and helped them is never really revealed—nor his fate. Similarly, why the parents (especially the mother) are war criminals isn't too clear. But, most importantly, exactly why Lore becomes disenchanted isn't really 100% clear. You assume that she has become skeptical about the Nazis and the rightness of the cause…but her actions in the end of the film could be attributed to many things—such as the repressive atmosphere at Grandma's. And, if she was disillusioned by the Nazis or horrified at their evil, what exactly caused this change in Lore? Could it simply be looking at the identity papers and photos from one supposedly dead Jew? And, apart from Lore growling at Grandma and stomping on some trinkets, how are she and the siblings going to deal with all this? All I know is that so much of the film is left to the interpretation of the viewer and had I not read a brief summary on IMDb, I would have felt lost.

The idea of a girl slowly coming to realize the evil of her country and parents IS intriguing—and in the documentary Hitler's Children you see interviews with surviving family members of many of the worst Nazi butchers of the war. However, with "Lore", the message seemed muted and not nearly as compelling. This, combined with the extensive use of the hand-held camera and a slow plot, made this film a bit of a letdown for me. While it's not a bad film, it sure could have been a lot more interesting.

If you do want to see the film, be advised that there is a decent amount of nudity and rather graphic depiction of suicides that are unsettling. I would have expected Lore and her siblings to perhaps see photos of dead Jews or concentration camp victims—but you don't. These folks were mostly Nazis who either killed themselves with gunshots to their head or were murdered brutally.

"Lore" was just released on DVD and is also available through Netflix.