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Author
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Topic: Nowhere In Africa
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Gerard S. Cohen
Jedi Master Film Handler
Posts: 975
From: Forest Hills, NY, USA
Registered: Sep 2001
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posted 03-22-2003 11:13 PM
I found this film beautiful and it absorbed my attention throughout its two hours and twenty minutes.
The story, by Stefan Zweig, a German Jewish novelist and short-story writer, treats the displacement from a comfortable, middle-class secular Jewish life in Germany to Nairobi, Kenya, escaping Hitler's repression, of a young couple and their child daughter.
This is an engaging study of marital strife and acculturation to Africa, to the Kenyan natives, language and culture,and to the British military and schooling.
Where, really, is home? This is a problem each confronts in a different way, and each character changes realistically in adapting existentially to circumstances. The African natives and the British are shown favorably. The dialog is in German,
the Kenyan language,and English, with a prayer in Hebrew. The English titles are succinct and easy reading, while the German is clear, with a softness like Yiddish that I found I could follow without understanding every word.
The beauty of the landscape, including Mount Kenya and Lake Nairobe in Cinemascope, and scenes of an attempt to ward off
a plague of locusts, were very moving. The nude scenes expressing sexual love were graphic and appropriate to the characters and action.
Caroline Link, the director, preserves the literary origin of the film by including some poems in English and German, including
the Lorelei by Heinrich Heine, and by the inclusion of such symbolic objects as a courtroom cloak, a dress, and a set of china that change meanings as the tale unfolds.
There is much love, yearning and heartache in this beautiful film.
Screened on 03/22/03 at the Kew Gardens Cinema (5 plex), Queens,
NYC. The feature was sharp, bright and clean, but the policy trailer was dirty and the Beckham trailer too loud. A slight rumble could be felt once or twice from the Long Island Railroad that runs below the theatre, and the house lights were too bright during the final credits. The huge screen was perfectly masked and illuminated.
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