Director – Andreas Dresen – 2024 – Germany – Cert. 15 – 125m
***
A young, pregnant German woman involved with a group of radicals trying to undermine the Nazi regime is arrested and put on trial with a possible death sentence – out in UK cinemas accompanied by the Kate Bush short Little Shrew (Snowflake) on Friday, June 27th
Its opening, pre-credits moments of a German mother and bespectacled, pregnant adult daughter picking strawberries in the garden belies what is to follow, but that sense of calm doesn’t last long as two barely seen black cars pull up in the lane. The pregnant woman packs a suitcase before the two men accompany her out to the car. How long will it take, she asks. That depends on you, comes the reply.
In the lift, the big, burly man asks after her pregnancy. It seems his wife, too, is expecting. When she is questioned in the interrogation room, she is asked about her husband’s radio equipment, on the table in front of her in a suitcase. She makes up stories about her innocence and ignorance, but they (including, when we finally see him, the man from the lift) run rings round her. As the big, burly man says, it doesn’t look good. A bloodied man is brought in. She struggles to name him. Fritz? Helmut? The burly man suggests Albert Hößler (Hans-Christian Hegewald) – parachutist, spy, signaller.
We flash back to happier times. Hilde (for it is she, played by Liv Lisa Fries) sits on the riverbank with women friends. Their idyllic afternoon is shattered when a man and Albert (“if anything happens, his name is Helmut”) arrive in a boat, fearing someone may be on to them.
From there, it shifts between prison life on the one hand, and the romantic-cum-domestic story leading to Hilde’s arrest on the other. A female guard assigned to Hilde, Miss Kuhn (Lisa Wagner), ruthless in an initial strip-searching session, turns out to be much kinder than our initial impressions suggest. Indeed, as the prison narrative proceeds, she turns out to be on Hilde’s side, helping her to plead her case with the authorities and do everything right to get back to ordinary, civilian life.
Much is made, too, of the fact of Hilde’s pregnancy – she talks to her unborn child in her cell, does her maternal, keep fit exercises unprompted and when her skin starts to itch and she has to eat unappetising gruel, it’s apparent that she won’t be in the best of health to give birth when the time comes.
A harrowing prison hospital birth sequence is shot mostly in one take with what appears to be the heavily pregnant Fries and skilfully framed with the handheld camera so that you never see the actual baby leaving the womb, but you completely believe in the pain and onscreen reality of childbirth. This is augmented by a callous male doctor who makes no secret of the fact he thinks her child will die soon after birth, and a midwife who is encouraging her to birth the boy and later gives helpful instructions for stimulating her milk production to feed the baby.
In civilian life, family friend Greta (Lisa Hrdina) fools around with parachutist Albert, even though, back home in Russia, he’s married to someone else. Both Hilde and Greta are complicit in transcribing radio messages from the front and posting them. To both of them, though, it seems like a girlish game – they haven’t taken on board the gravity of their actions.
As the flashbacks proceed, intercut with Hilde’s time in prison, it feels as if there are two movies – a fairly lacklustre outing about young German radicals plotting against the Nazis and an intermittently much more compelling one about a pregnant prisoner due to go for trial with a likely death sentence, who must nevertheless do the best for her newly born in prison child while she can. With the exception of the edge-of-the-seat childbirth sequence, and the exploration of the plight of a pregnant woman in prison, this is a largely routine programmer.
From Hilde, With Love is out in cinemas in the UK accompanied by the Kate Bush short Little Shrew (Snowflake) on Friday, June 27th.
Trailer: