Germany, Year Zero
Roberto RosseliniInitial release: December 1, 1948 (Italy)
Many years ago I watched Roberto Rosselini's Rome, Open City and Paisan. These two films formed the first two parts of what would be Rosselini's unofficial war trilogy, neorealist films depicting the grim conditions of the second world war and its aftermath. I never got around to watching the third film, titled Germany, Year Zero; after six years, I'm finally rectifying that omission, and there's a sense of finality in finishing what I started all those years ago. And what an appropriate film to end this era on, a bleak, uncompromising tale of life in occupied Berlin.
Edmund is a twelve year old boy, whose mother has died, his father is ill, his brother is in hiding, and his sister struggles to keep her dignity providing for the family. Deemed too young to join work teams, but too old to play with other children, he wanders the battle-blasted ruins of Berlin looking for ways to make money, or failing that, find food, or failing that, coal to warm the apartment his family shares with four other families. Conditions in Berlin are dire; most of the city is destroyed, people are starving, and there are still bodies to bury. The older children that Edmund tries to befriend largely ignore him, or try to rip him off. The one person who seems to listen to Edmund is his former teacher, a committed Nazi who gives off the vibe of also being a kidtoucher (though nothing comes of it.) All the while, he worries about his older brother, who is afraid to turn himself in to the Allies because he kept fighting until the day the country surrendered. (It's subtly implied, though not outright stated, that he was in a Waffen-SS unit.)
In 1947, when the film's exteriors were shot, Berlin was still in ruins and food was scarce. When the cast returned in 1948 to do interior scenes, they were flown to Italy, where they so gorged themselves on Italian cuisine that they had to be put on crash diets to maintain continuity, or else they'd look too well-fed. Most of them did not return to Germany. In a sense, Germany, Year Zero is a time capsule, capturing a moment in history as it happened; in that way, it's very similar to Rome, Open City, which was produced by hook and by crook while the war was still ongoing but the Nazis had been largely pushed out of Italy.
There's a sense of surreality to Germany, Year Zero; much of the film has us following Edmund as he wanders Berlin like a hungry little ghost, looking very small amidst the blackened bricks and crumbling concrete, like the tiny figure of a point and click adventure game protagonist on an endless series of quests to trade or scrounge anything useful. It's this very surreality that drives the film to its climax, when, with the innocence of a child of war, he gets the idea (inspired by his teacher's rants about culling the weak) to secretly poison his father to better help the rest of the family. The crime goes unnoticed amidst the chaos of Edmund's older brother being arrested, but when Edmund realizes the enormity of what he's done (and his teacher, horrified that it might be traced back to him, runs Edmund off) he commits suicide. So ends Germany, Year Zero, a final denouement on one of the darkest eras of human history.
By far the bleakest of Rosselini's war trilogy, if not his bleakest film entirely, Germany, Year Zero is a triumph of Italian neorealism, with little in the way of cinematic adornment, Rosselini preferring to rely on simple shot composition and tonally-incongruent wipe transitions, which only further adds to the film's surreality, as if Edmund and by extension the viewer are trapped in a kind of nightmare world where the shadows loom large and teenagers prostitute themselves for cigarettes and it's all played for laughs.
But nobody's laughing.