REVIEWED - DOWNFALL/DER UNTERGANGIn 2001, after over 15 years directing German TV drama, Oliver Hirschbiegel made an impressive cinema debut with the edgy, reality TV-inspired psychodrama, The Experiment, in which volunteers were divided into guards and prisoners for a fortnight. The movie directly addressed the corrupting nature of power, and Hirschbiegel returns to that theme on a far more elaborate canvas in his remarkable new film.
Downfall, which charts the last 10 days of the Third Reich, dares to humanise Adolf Hitler, generally the subject of caricatured treatment in cinema. There is a rare and eerie authenticity about this intense recreation, incisively and illuminatingly scripted by producer Bernt Eichinger and based on Joachim Fast's book, Inside Hitler's Bunker, and the memoirs of Hitler's secretary, Traudl Junge, herself the subject of the recent documentary, Blind Spot.
In a prologue set in November 1942, the Führer (Bruno Ganz) personally selects the 22-year-old Junge (Alexandra Maria Lara) from five applicants for the job, before the film moves forward to Hitler's 56th birthday on April 20th, 1945. Although Eva Braun (vivaciously portrayed by Juliane Kohler) has organised a party, there is little to celebrate as the Russian forces are encroaching on Berlin.
At the core of this thoughtful and fascinating film is the riveting, complex portrayal of Hitler by Ganz, the versatile Swiss-born actor, as an ailing, stooped figure at an advanced stage of physical and mental decay. His left hand quivers behind his back as he moves around, but he remains domineering and is so hopelessly self-deluded that he cannot contemplate the reality that is imminent defeat.
Hitler believes he has conquered Europe all by himself but has been deceived by high-ranking officers, and that he should have followed the example of Stalin and had them shot. Praising a boy soldier for destroying two tanks, he says: "I wish my generals had your courage." Time and again, he expresses contempt for his fellow Germans, dismissively noting that "in a war like this, there are no civilians" and "if the war is lost, it's immaterial if the people perish, too", and repeatedly uttering his mantra that "whatever happens to Germans is their destiny".
Although Hitler is depicted as being prone to outbursts of apoplectic rage, self-serving paranoia and rabid anti-Semitism, he is also shown to shed a tear as he and Braun prepare for their suicide.
Played in a chilling performance by Corrina Harfouch, the glacial, impeccably groomed Magda Goebbels is so determined that her family will not live "in a world without National Socialism" that she methodically administers poison to her six young children before she and her husband enact their own double suicide.
While Hirschbiegel effectively sets most of the film within the grim atmosphere of the Führerbunker, the succinctly titled Downfall is equally powerful when the camera ventures outside and captures the destruction of Berlin and the mounting human toll as vividly as the panic gripping the Nazis while their world caves in all around them.
