Aimée & Jaguar

Aimée & Jaguar was nominated this year for the Golden Globe's Best Foreign Film, and although it lost to Pedro Almodóvar's All About My Mother, it's easy to see why the film has become something of a cause célèbre (especially in its native Germany, where it's consistently taken home the silver and gold at various festivals). It's an immensely affecting period drama, a love story set in the waning, ruinous final days of the German Reich, with the added kick of having for its protagonists a pair of lesbian lovers from either side of the Nazis' dreadful bloodline. It's also a gritty period film, with bombs bursting overhead and the terrible constant fear of being found out, either as a Jew or, nearly as bad, as a lesbian. The film (which is based on a true story) is wrapped in a throwaway framing device that does nothing to abet the meat of the drama but effectively leads us into a Berlin 1944-45 in which Felice (Schrader) and her lover Ilse (Wokalek) are busy making merry while the bombs rain around them. Felice, like her nom de guerre Jaguar, appears to lead (in spirit, anyway) a group of Jewish lesbians. She's a twiggish rogue, committed to life and love and, dangerously, the underground, to whom she delivers parceled documents of German troop movements that she's “borrowed” from her employer, a Nazi newspaper editor. Able to pass as an Aryan, Felice continuously flaunts her hidden Judaism (and lesbianism) in the face of the ruling party. It's almost as if she wants to get caught, but her audacious behavior both in and out of the bedroom merely serves to heighten her sense of untouchability. When she's introduced to Lilly (Köhler), the German housewife for whom Ilse, Felice senses a challenge and decides to seduce her, falling in love in the process. Lilly, who's been recognized by the Reich for producing a quartet of fine young Aryan boys with her husband Günther (Buck), a soldier on the Eastern front, may be a model hausfrau -- she tidies up like a madwoman in preparation for a visit from her lieutenant lover -- but she's a lousy Nazi, less concerned with party politics than she is with keeping the dust rhinos at bay and maintaining a brave façade while the city around her is pummeled into submission by the constant presence of Allied bombers. Färberbock, working from the bestselling German novel by Erica Fischer, focuses almost exclusively on this doubly forbidden love. Lilly's ignorance of her lover's Judaism is complete; she falls for this spindly, full-lipped beauty like a ton of bratwurst, and it changes her prosaic homelife completely, to the point where she demands a divorce from her husband. There's a touching solemnity to much of Aimée & Jaguar -- the nightly air raids are briefly glimpsed in smoky silhouette, and daytime Berlin is seen as a vast, shattered hulk of smoldering brickwork and death-queued Jews. But the film, like Felice, is also playful. Inside Lilly's ancient flat a righteous love affair is blossoming. There's not a wasted performance in Färberbock's film, from Buck's battered Günther on down, but it's Schrader's trembling, occasionally ethereal performance as the tough-as-nails Felice that grabs hold and never lets go. Capturing the first blush of new love on film is a difficult task in the most banal of circumstances. That Aimée & Jaguar manages so well in triple duty as a wartime melodrama with a lesbian twist is remarkable. It's a sapphic Enemies, A Love Story, and the fireworks bursting overhead are deadly.