Jud Süß is the newest movie by Oskar Roehler, starring Tobias Moretti, Moritz Bleibtreu, Martina Gedeck and Justus von Dohnanyi.
Plot:
1940. Ferdinand Marian (Tobias Moretti) is a mildly successful actor in Berlin. When Joseph Goebbels (Moritz Bleibtreu) sees him as Iago in Shakespeare’s Othello, he decides that Marian would make the perfect leading man in his upcoming propaganda movie Jud Süß. Even more than that: directed by Veit Harlan, the movie is supposed to be art, propaganda without being propaganda. Marian is hesitant to accept the role since his wife (Martina Gedeck) is half-Jewish and he’s hiding a Jewish friend in their garden shed. But Goebbels won’t take no for an answer.
Jud Süß wants to be scandalous and all it got so far were pretty bad reviews. It’s not a great movie, but it’s not as bad as most of these reviews want you to believe. It does have some interesting passages and if you put the surrounding scandal out of your head, you will enjoy the film.
The most critisized points in the reviews of this film I’ve read so far were that a) it’s historically inaccurate (Marian’s wife was catholic; Marian did not kill himself by car accident, he just had an accident) and b) there’s a scene were a German woman asks Marian to re-enact the rape scene from the film with her. He goes along with it and they do it in the attic, in front of an open window while Berlin is bombed.
I have to say that the historical inaccuracies didn’t bother me as much for being inaccurate, but more because they embellished the drama of the story, which was completely unnecessary. And the rape-roleplay scene was mostly ridiculous. I mean, it was pulled out of pretty much every context and it just stood there and wasn’t commented upon in any way. Could have been handled better.
The biggest problem I had was that the cast seemed to be playing in at least 3 different settings. Tobias Moretti was good, but he was not in a film, he was on a theatre stage. Moritz Bleibtreu was good, but he was playing a villain in a campy British war parody. Martina Gedeck and Justus von Dohnanyi were the only ones who seemed to have played in the same film and especially Martina Gedeck was great in it.
The story itself is interesting and there is a really great scene where Marian is watching the movie with some soldiers and they get more enraged with every passing minute, starting to insult the Jews etc., while Marian is slowly falling apart next to them.
Summarising: Don’t let yourself be scandalized. There are good parts to this film, and it’s an interesting approach to the subject.
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I must say I was disappointed even by “Sopie’s choice” which I still deem to be the best German movie about this era.
German producers should leave movies about nazi Germany to Hollywood otherweise their epic failure is guaranteed. They try too hard. :P
on an intellectual sidenote:
Lüth/Harlan) was one of the most important German decisions concerning personality rights. Senator Lüth opposed showing Harlan’s new film at a film festival in Germany after WWII and asked theatres to boycot Harlan’s new film.
And what was the decision regarding Lüth/Harlan?
Lüth criticised both Harlan and the producers. The producers sued him for slander. The German Superme Court ruled that Lüth was allowed to criticisize Harlan and the producers. …
This isn’t very exciting. What is exciting is that there wasn’t any civil law backing that position. Civil law stated something like “whoever does something that causes negative economic consequences for someone else, will be held accountable (damages etc)”, so civil law was on the producers side.
So the Judges took the Constitution (constitutional law, not civil law) to back their decision. Lo and behold, Llüth had a personal right to free speech and human dignity and rights had to be balanced.
PS: The story is inaccurate as I don’t want to look it up and my memory is 3 years old and I don’t know much about German law. :P But I hope it gives you some kind of a basic idea.
I understand where you’re coming from now. :) Thanks!