Mozjoukine
Surprising to see the negative response this film has received on this site.It is a usually convincing account of a Nazi Hunter couple who dedicated themselves to tracking down Klaus Barbie - "the Butcher of Lyons", which moves briskly through a complicated and occasionally confusing succession of events spread between Europe and South America. It gives the impression of being special pleading, using a limited budget effectively. It's not outclassed by the more ambitious MUNICH, which shares some of its personnel and intended audience.Touches register, like the meager life style of the Klarsfeld's contrasted with the luxury of Barbie's existence or Attal's clicking the hammer on the empty pistol held against another target to demonstrate the possibility of his assassination, Maybe I'm sheltered from the short comings of the spoken material by my ignorance of most of the languages but the always impressive Franka Potente speaking them, manages to convince me.Attal's awful hair piece is the major distraction.
Hernán Iturralde
This movie tells the story of how the Klarsfelds, a French-German couple, devoted 12 years of their lives to bring Klaus Barbie, the second world war Nazi criminal, to justice. And succeeding in doing so. While the story seems perfect (and it is) to be translated into a movie this attempt fails in many levels for different reasons and I'll try to explain at least some of them.Franka Potente (whose acting skills I respect) does a poor job, and it is mainly because she obviously is not fluent in french. That on itself, of course, is not a bad thing, but portraying a woman who is supposed to have some confidence in the use of the language becomes a major impediment. She has rehearsed her lines (obviously) but they almost every time sound forced and uncomfortable for her.The big challenge (among very many) about directing a movie spoken in so many languages (four) lies in the fact that, if the director is not fluent in some of those languages he won't be able to direct the actors precisely. And this seems to be the case here. Especially in those parts where the movie is spoken only in Spanish.I want to mention the fact that I have just finished translating the movie into Spanish (for subtitles and dubbed versions) and therefore am very familiar with every aspect of the dialog.Some scenes are just laughable, and two come instantly to mind. The first one is a scene in which Beate Klarsfeld is talking (in French) to a Bolivian government adviser (who speaks Spanish), and somehow she seems to understand perfectly everything he says (he, on the other hand, has a translator by his side). The acting by the Bolivian actor is so horrifying (and I don't want to discredit him as an actor because you can tell he is following the directors suggestions) that renders the scene completely comedic and out of context within the seriousness of the movie.A secretary coming into an office and saying just two lines makes for an excellent laugh on a later scene. She speaks as if she hadn't ever spoken Spanish without completely overacting.Is not that all Spanish acting is bad, some of the Spanish speaking actors are very good actually, but my guess is that it depended on each actors instinct.Not only the Spanish is bad, there's the part of Margaret, played by Sophia Eva Wilhelmi, who is supposed to be German, but her German (and I'm almost certain she was dubbed) has an accent. Probably some Southamerican born out of an Austrian or Swiss family, but almost certainly not German. Her character is eavesdropping in a scene where the "bad" Bolivian generals are plotting with Barbie, and they're speaking in Spanish, but there's no reason to believe her character would speak, or at least understand, Spanish. So, what was she doing there? (By the way, the "bad people" almost always say things with an evil smile on their faces. Just plain dumb)Hans Zischler, who is very good and believable playing Barbie, has some horrific moments dealing with some very long Spanish sequences. And mind you, one thing is to have an accent (which his character is allowed to have) and something else is to have certain complicated words in your vocabulary which are not up to scale with the mistakes and mispronunciation of the lines you might have. By the time this takes place, Barbie is supposed to have been living over twenty years in a Spanish speaking country. No one speaks that fluently and with that kind of flowery vocabulary if he can't even pronounce very easy words. The lines were learned and rehearsed but very badly delivered.But the most insulting part of the movie is Beate Klarsfled giving an interview to a Bolivian journalist. In the scene Beate explains who Barbie is and then she mentions the Gestapo. The Bolivian journalist looks at her with a puzzled look and asks: The Gestapo? Look, it may be possible that some lizard in a desert, living behind a cactus doesn't know what the Gestapo is, but a journalist interviewing a Nazi-hunter would probably know what it means. So, to make a point of how complicated Beate's struggle to shine light on the story is, the writer, or the director, puts down a whole people. It's very insulting to the Bolivian people in particular and to the viewers intelligence in general.My conclusion would be: watch the film because of the story, if you want to be informed about it, but you'll be forced to look over the facts written about in this review.
kas-26
This movie is a really poor performance. The actors are all overacting, neither do they catch your sympathy or interest to get involved in the story, not that there is much of a story. Its also at times extremely confusing and irritating when they switch from french to German language constantly. The scenes are to short and is cut Jason Bourne style like it was some kind of action film, in an attempt to make the story more spicy. The film has no characters, no drama, no action, no humor in addition to the lack of a real story. It has nothing. So if you spot this in the shelf at the video store do not assume that it is a film like München or similar like I did. It is not. Total failure
