13 Min­utes

Have you ever been real­ly naffed off when you turn the cor­ner at the end of your road, only to see your bus pulling away? You think to your­self, if only I’d left my keys in my pock­et last night, or if only I’d closed all the win­dows ear­li­er, I’d have made that bus. Now, imag­ine that bus was Hitler and instead of catch­ing it, you want­ed to blow it up.

That’s 13 Min­utes in a nut­shell, a new film by the Ger­man direc­tor Oliv­er Hirsch­biegel, best know for mak­ing Nazi inter­net par­o­dy mag­net, Down­fall, and more recent­ly, gen­er­al inter­net par­o­dy mag­net, Diana, a crum­my biopic of the People’s Princess. It sees the direc­tor mak­ing a slight if worth­while return to a more robust and mean­ing­ful form of film­mak­ing – a giant step in the right direc­tion more than an out-and-out success.

The film is a biog­ra­phy of Georg Elser, a mild-man­nered coun­try boy, musi­cian, lothario and watch-mak­er, who, as the rise of Nazism in Ger­many dur­ing the late ​’30s and ear­ly ​’40s sees many of his close com­pa­tri­ots per­se­cut­ed and abused for their beliefs, decides to take vio­lent and rad­i­cal action as a way to save his coun­try from obliv­ion. Elser, as played by Chris­t­ian Friedel is a strange case, as he worked entire­ly on his own in his mis­sion to take out Hitler by plant­i­ng a pre­ci­sion-timed in a bierkeller at the exact point the Furher was due to take to the stage for an ora­tion, almost as if to mock the stric­tures of Nazi efficiency.

Hirschbiegel’s film starts by con­firm­ing that Elser’s plan was a fail­ure, even though a hand­ful of high-rank­ing Nazi offi­cials were killed in the blast. He is cap­tured almost instant­ly, then swift­ly strapped to bed and tor­tured for infor­ma­tion. This trig­gers a series of flash­backs which show just how and why he became so deter­mined to car­ry out this scheme. The answer, unsur­pris­ing­ly, is that the Nazis were awful, bru­tal, igno­rant, etc, and he felt that a ran­dom act of vio­lence against their top man was the only way this evil could be instan­ta­neous­ly stymied for good.

All of this would appear to com­prise of a fair­ly short sto­ry, espe­cial­ly con­sid­er­ing Elser was hap­py for his cap­tors to know his plans and the rea­sons for them. How­ev­er, the idea of a lone assas­sin doesn’t cohere with the Nazis’ favoured nar­ra­tive that it was idea dreamed up by irate com­mu­nists. The film becomes less about Elser’s cul­pa­bil­i­ty and the moral grey area in which he chose to oper­ate, and more about how oth­er lives are placed in dan­ger when his sto­ry doesn’t check out with the Nazi brass.

It has all the ingre­di­ents of a styl­ish, thought­ful and pre­scient thriller about a fas­ci­nat­ing char­ac­ter, but for some rea­son, it just doesn’t come togeth­er in a par­tic­u­lar­ly sat­is­fy­ing man­ner. The flash­backs start to become very tedious by the third and fourth remem­brance, while the slow rev­e­la­tion of why Elser opt­ed to do this is obvi­ous from the film’s open­ing frames. As a first step back into polite cin­e­mat­ic soci­ety after a long run of duf­fers, Hirschbiegel’s film has a cer­tain val­ue to it.