When watching "The Reader", I could hear the repressed low-pitched sound of the cello all the time. It seemed that I was a restrained and introverted person. The secret emotions that I had endured in my heart for many years finally couldn't be suppressed. Low talk.
Michael's secret, an indecent love that lasted only one summer, was short-lived, but it affected him throughout the rest of his life.
Hanna's secret is the fact that she can't read or write with all her might, even at the cost of life imprisonment.
A summer affair, where lust and sweet chaos overlap, ends with Hanna's sudden departure. We met again at the war criminals trial court. He was a law student who was watching, and she was the defendant who shocked him. He still loved her, but had to toss between trying to understand what she was doing and his unavoidable conscience. Because of love, he finally discovered her secret; because of love, he had to hesitate between respecting her choice and defending her interests; after the verdict, he who chose the former shed tears. And because of love, he resumed the habit of reading aloud to her back then, with tapes and tapes, to accompany her through the long and lonely years in prison; because he did not understand or forgive, he refused to reply. Letters, lying quietly in the drawer barren.
Twenty years seems to be a snap of a finger, and only those who are in it know how time has turned white, folded memories, and precipitated joys and sorrows. After her sentence was completed, she chose to leave; he left sad to tell secrets...
Reflecting on World War II and human nature, the film is full of sweat. Although this film is not unique, it is also not overbearing. This time, the protagonist is no longer a victim of war and genocide, but an ordinary person who has become an accomplice of evil through ignorance, a second-generation German who grew up in the shadow of the post-war Nazis. According to the results of a large-scale study reported by the German newspaper Der Spiegel: During World War II, about 200,000 ordinary people participated in the massacre and became accomplices. Among them, people of different ages, religions, education levels, and occupational classes are involved. I also heard that Germans born and raised after the Third Reich generally have a sense of guilt and shame, and they are cautious and avoid the concept of a country. Hanna and Michael in the film are just members of the Ganges Sand Number.
The film does not seem to intend to explore and dig deeper, but leaves some faint question marks for people to think about: when the society is more advanced and the values are more diverse, there will be more and more complex gray levels between black and white. At that time, what should we do? Judgment is right or wrong? How should we be vigilant and stop repeating the mistakes of history?
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