‘Amrum’ Review: Can This Poignant Drama Make You Ache for a Member of the Hitler Youth?  

It’s hard to imagine a less promising setup for a movie about a young boy’s act of kindness toward his mother than the one that’s supplied in Fatih Akin’s “Amrum,” which premiered on Thursday night at the Cannes Film Festival. The film takes place in 1945, with 12-year-old Nanning outside the house he shares with his mother, brother and aunt on the German island of Amrum when he hears the radio deliver the news that Adolph Hitler “has fallen.” Inside the house, Nanning’s very pregnant mother, Hille, lets out a piercing scream and then a gasp, as her water breaks on the kitchen floor and she gives birth to a baby.

Once the baby is born, Hille refuses to eat, suffering from a likely combination of post-partum depression and grief over the death of her Fuhrer. She insists that she only wants white bread with butter and honey, all things that are nearly impossible to obtain in a time of scarcity. But Nanning makes it his goal to somehow get his mother her dream meal – a quest that would be heartwarming and inspiring if it weren’t undertaken by a member of the Hitler Youth out of love for a mother who cannot shed her allegiance to the Nazi leader.

Or is it still heartwarming, or at the very least heartbreaking? Quietly and gracefully, “Amrum” asks us to consider those questions; it’s not as austere and deliberately unsentimental as Jonathan Glazer’s Cannes hit and Oscar winner “The Zone of Interest” was two years ago, but in a way it, too, is a family drama set against the horrors of World War II and the Nazi regime. Akin, the Turkish-German director whose other films include “The Edge of Heaven” and “The Fade,” does a wonderfully understated job of setting the innocence and the cruelty of childhood against a time in which the fall of fascism could have a seismic effect on a family and a country.

Some early reactions out of Cannes questioned the idea of exploring German sorrow over Hitler’s fall at a time when neo-Naziism is on the rise. But Akin has said that the current threat from the far right was one of the reasons he made the film, which was co-written by 85-year-old German director, writer and actor Hark Bohm, who based it on his own experiences on Amrum but despaired of directing it himself because of his age.

When we meet young Nanning at the beginning of the film, he’s helping out a local farmer, Tessa (played by Akin veteran Diane Kruger) in exchange for milk and the promise of butter. He clearly comes across as a good kid and a fine neighborhood helper – but after overheating Tessa talk about how the Russian army is closing in on Berlin and the war may be ending soon, he innocently asks his mother if that means his father will be returning home soon from the front. Hille (Laura Tonke) turns out to be a staunch Nazi supporter who views such talk as undermining the troops, telling Nanning that he must report the neighbor’s traitorous talk to the authorities immediately.

That’s when Hitler dies (from the sound of it, the remote island community never hears the word “suicide” from German media) and Nanning undertakes the herculean task of finding  white bread, butter and honey when there’s none to be had. As Nanning, first-time actor Jasper Billerbeck is in some ways a German equivalent of Owen Cooper, star of the British TV series “Adolescence”: With no professional acting experience, he makes us ache for a child who has done (or in this case, simply thought) awful things.

The film is beautifully shot, delicately shaded and at times almost unbearably poignant; where “The Zone of Interest” backed away from its characters to chilling effect, “Amrum” leans in and asks us to consider the lingering effects of the totalitarian brainwashing of a populace as the beliefs that have been forced upon them begin to crumble.

There’s nothing showy about “Amrum,” but it can leave an audience shaken. Akin has fashioned a rare film that relies on the power of simplicity to tell a story that is anything but simple.

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