Lore | Little White Lies

Lore

22 Feb 2013 / Released: 22 Feb 2013

Words by David Jenkins

Directed by Cate Shortland

Starring Kai Malina, Nele Trebs, and Saskia Rosendahl

Young woman with curly hair wearing a floral blouse and suspenders, looking pensively through a window.
Young woman with curly hair wearing a floral blouse and suspenders, looking pensively through a window.
3

Anticipation.

Cate Shortland went a little off-the radar following her 2004 debut Somersault.

3

Enjoyment.

The melodramatic performances and plush settings make this a very easy watch.

2

In Retrospect.

Certainly sounds good on paper, but a little shallow and overstated in reality.

The bold con­cept behind Cate Shortland’s wrench­ing Nazi down­fall dra­ma is sold short by its overblown style.

How’s this for a provoca­tive set­up? Unre­pen­tant mid­dle-class Nazi chil­dren are – Leder­ho­sen an’ all – eject­ed into the unfor­giv­ing Ger­man coun­try­side as the régime top­ples around them. This time the cen­tral pro­tag­o­nist is a feisty young Aryan woman, and she remains ful­ly in thrall to the glo­ry of Ger­many and unshake­ably repulsed by the Jew­ish race.

Lore is an emo­tive Ger­man lan­guage dra­ma by Aus­tralian direc­tor Cate Short­land and though it is pri­mar­i­ly an inves­ti­ga­tion into how suf­fer­ing, pover­ty and humil­i­a­tion can work towards alter­ing our ingrained polit­i­cal ideals, it’s also a film which takes a top­sy-turvy look how we iden­ti­fy with strong women’ in cinema.

Lore, ably played by Sask­ia Rosendahl, is named guardian of her four younger sib­lings while her par­ents fever­ish­ly shred the evi­dence of their long-term Nazi com­plic­i­ty. The kids are then packed off on a daunt­ing, 900km cross-coun­try trek to the sanc­tu­ary of their grand­moth­er in the North, and though their path is beset by a country’s sup­pu­rat­ing war wounds, their only accom­plice is an ema­ci­at­ed and mys­te­ri­ous Jew­ish drifter named Thomas (Kai Malina).

It’s a plush and strange­ly ornate film despite the hell­ish set­ting and there’s always the sense that Short­land is per­haps more inter­est­ed in mak­ing a crimped, up-mar­ket cos­tume dra­ma in the mould of Jane Campion’s Bright Star than she is a bona fide sur­vival movie with dirt under its fin­ger­nails. She inces­sant­ly beau­ti­fies the squalor and mat­ters of tone are not helped by Max Richter’s swirling and hys­ter­i­cal­ly inclined neo-clas­si­cal score.

But for all its styl­is­tic over­state­ment, Lore still res­onates (albeit mild­ly) as a sto­ry about inno­cence lost and found. The young char­ac­ters devel­oped and prac­ticed their vile ide­ol­o­gy with­out ever being par­ty to the atroc­i­ties of the Nazi meat grinder. When pre­sent­ed with the full hor­ror of their beloved cause, Lore’s inno­cence is at first ques­tioned, then cor­rupt­ed, then bru­tal­ly overturned.

You might like