A small Bulgarian town, World War II. Walter, a Nazi officer and former painter, oversees a detention center from where Greek Jews are brought before being deported further to Auschwitz. A Jewish woman, Ruth, addresses him across the barbed wire to ask for help for a woman giving birth. Walter rejects her, but later still sends a doctor who delivers the baby. Walter walks with Ruth outside, under the surpervision of a Nazi guard, and enjoys talking with her. A doctor is arrested under suspicion of delivering medicine to the partisans in the forest. Walter hears from his colleague Kurt about Auschwitz. Walter devises a plan to get Ruth and hide her, but he is too late: the Nazis loaded all the Jews onto a train and deported them already.
The first German movie mentioning the Auschwitz concentration camp, a one made in East Germany, "Stars" is an excellent and sensible depiction of a transition of a person from an obedient, rigid, cold official to an active human being with broader consciousness who gains enough courage to act and try to make a difference, even though the system forbids it. The director Konrad Wolff directs the movie with a lot of colorful details, energy, and refuses to present any character as black and white: Walter is a symbol for many Nazi officers who followed orders and laws of their country, without even knowing what they are doing, but who later realized its inhumanity and their error of serving a totalitarian dictatorship. Since Walter is an amateur painter, an artist, he has some connection with humanity and thus develops forbidden empathy with the Jewish woman, Ruth. Several details are wonderful. Some cinematic techniques are aesthetic: for instance, the camera zooms in on Walter's painting of a church tower, and then there is a match cut to a real church tower in the town, and a zoom out. When Ruth teaches kids Greek alphabet in the detention center, as a pregnant woman's shriek is heard from the next room, the camera suddenly rises 10 ft up in the air, above Ruth and the kids.
Wolff presents the private lives of Nazis Walter and Kurt with a perplexingly casual, calm tone, as if he is following two ordinary people doing ordinary things and chatting. For instance, in a tavern where Kurt and Walter are having dinner with two local Bulgarian women and a collaborator, Kurt jokes that Bulgaria declared war against the US and Britain: "Did you hear, Walter? They declared them war, because they are far away from their shooting range." On a hill, Walter mocks the entire civilization: "Humanity needed two million years to end up back where it started. A pity for all that effort. During war, everyone is a chimpanzee". While going to bed in the barrack, Walter asks Kurt what kind of a place Auschwitz actually is, doubting it is just a planting garden as the propaganda claims, and Kurt gives a chillingly calm answer: "It's a human meat grinder". The movie slows down for poetic conversations between Walter and Ruth, who mentions how stars in the sky are peaceful even despite war on Earth, yet still manages to help build their character development further. Like most European movies, "Stars" doesn't follow the typical Hollywood three-act structure, but rather chronicles a time and place from real life, also having enough courage to avoid a happy ending, opting instead for dark and bitter lessons about life: even the smallest clogs in the system supported that evil, and had no excuse for not finding out more information about it.
Grade:+++
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