Lore is neither a denial of the Holocaust nor a sop of sympathy to surviving Germans. Instead, this is a film that treats, often very subtly and wordlessly, the terrible ambiguities and uncertainties of a situation we have learned to understand as completely black and white and transparent. It also deals with deeply diseased family relationships as a source for genocidal thinking. One of the main points of the narrative is that the teenager Lore discovers that her father was a genocidal war criminal. The film handles this discovery wordlessly. But there is a very explicit set of gestures that explain precisely what she has seen: she first stands in a crowd of Germans forced by the Allies to confront photographs of mass murder in exchange for food (this is mentioned very briefly in an aside by an unknown character), then she notices her father in uniform in one of the photographs of mass murder; she touches the photograph, and the glue backing it adheres to her fingers. Later she tries to remove the traces of glue from her hand. She returns and removes the part of the picture where her father is standing. Because the film is wordless on this point, the viewer doesn't know whether this is because she wants to keep the photograph to remind herself of her father's role in the atrocities or to deny his guilt. But subsequently her younger brother exhibits a treasured image of their father in that same uniform and boasts that "Vati" (Daddy) is out fighting in Belarus (the site of many atrocities). Lore somehow acquires that photograph as well, and we see her put the two images of Vati in uniform together and bury them under mud and grass. That's how this film works, and by working this way, it manages to reveal the painfully mixed and contradictory motivations all real human beings have. It interests me that some viewers are not able to follow a narrative given in images.
It is the dynamic between Lore and her parents that I think is a key element to this film, and it has to do with how young people become genocidal, and what might make them break with their psychological training. There is an extraordinarily ugly relationship between the parents and between the parents and the children. It was part of the ideology of Nazi Germany to reward German women with medals for producing as many children as possible. In other words, it is entirely possible that a woman like Lore's mother (a fanatic lover of Hitler) would produce a brood of five solely in service of the Fuehrer. Her husband (whom she also seems to loathe for what she calls his cowardice in abandoning the family and the cause) is just a prosthetic husband. She deeply jealous of Lore for her beauty and her budding sexuality, and in the scenes we watch, she treats her children as inept servants. When Lore shuts her younger brother up in a cabinet and vilifies him in the cruelest terms possible for stealing food (when he is hungry), one understands that she is following the example of her own parents' authoritarian methods. Cruelty, a harsh authoritarian morality, and a lack of loving kindness were the daily bread of that household; this is reflected in Lore's behavior as "mother" to her siblings.
When the mother leaves the family, it is not for inexplicable reasons, as one reviewer implied. We see that the parents are both implicated in the crimes of the war, because they go to the length of destroying their library and documents. The parents are clearly thinking about Allied revenge (when the mother tells Lore that the Allies kill babies, and that's why the mother can't take her nursing infant with her, the viewer doesn't know whether or not she believes this herself). We know why the mother leaves, but not where she goes. She says she is turning herself in, but she may be fleeing to a safe house and taking up a new identity. The children would keep her from escaping her old identity, so they have to be jettisoned.
In the amazing scene toward the end of the film when the grandmother (also -- surprise -- a strict authoritarian parent) chastises Lore's surviving younger brother for eating without the proper table manners, Lore finally makes a break with her upbringing. She shows us that she recognizes the hypocrisy and lies of her parents' generation by intentionally eating "like an animal" in support of her brother, spilling milk on the table and lapping it from her hands. And then she breaks all the little kitschy statuettes, including the little deer.
And on the subject of the Jewish helper -- yes, his identity is ambiguous. But the fact that he is a camp survivor is made clear from his tattoo. That he has false papers is an important point; the regime was all about telling people who they were. When Lore understands that he is a Jew, she immediately tries to put him into the category "Jew" she has been taught: parasite, lecher. But he breaks out of those categories. He refuses to be the person she frames him to be. The fact that we as viewers are anxious to have his identity defined through "papers" puts us unhappily into the same position as the Nazis.
On the whole, this film could disappoint some viewers by not maintaining traditional story structure or temporal structure, by leaving significant things unsaid and unexplained, by avoiding some of the traditional scenes of war films (destroyed cities, fire-fights), by depicting American soldiers in a less than heroic or even congenial way. But if you are a film viewer with patience for non-mainstream filmmaking, this is a profound and beautiful (though sometimes brutal) look at disease.
It is the dynamic between Lore and her parents that I think is a key element to this film, and it has to do with how young people become genocidal, and what might make them break with their psychological training. There is an extraordinarily ugly relationship between the parents and between the parents and the children. It was part of the ideology of Nazi Germany to reward German women with medals for producing as many children as possible. In other words, it is entirely possible that a woman like Lore's mother (a fanatic lover of Hitler) would produce a brood of five solely in service of the Fuehrer. Her husband (whom she also seems to loathe for what she calls his cowardice in abandoning the family and the cause) is just a prosthetic husband. She deeply jealous of Lore for her beauty and her budding sexuality, and in the scenes we watch, she treats her children as inept servants. When Lore shuts her younger brother up in a cabinet and vilifies him in the cruelest terms possible for stealing food (when he is hungry), one understands that she is following the example of her own parents' authoritarian methods. Cruelty, a harsh authoritarian morality, and a lack of loving kindness were the daily bread of that household; this is reflected in Lore's behavior as "mother" to her siblings.
When the mother leaves the family, it is not for inexplicable reasons, as one reviewer implied. We see that the parents are both implicated in the crimes of the war, because they go to the length of destroying their library and documents. The parents are clearly thinking about Allied revenge (when the mother tells Lore that the Allies kill babies, and that's why the mother can't take her nursing infant with her, the viewer doesn't know whether or not she believes this herself). We know why the mother leaves, but not where she goes. She says she is turning herself in, but she may be fleeing to a safe house and taking up a new identity. The children would keep her from escaping her old identity, so they have to be jettisoned.
In the amazing scene toward the end of the film when the grandmother (also -- surprise -- a strict authoritarian parent) chastises Lore's surviving younger brother for eating without the proper table manners, Lore finally makes a break with her upbringing. She shows us that she recognizes the hypocrisy and lies of her parents' generation by intentionally eating "like an animal" in support of her brother, spilling milk on the table and lapping it from her hands. And then she breaks all the little kitschy statuettes, including the little deer.
And on the subject of the Jewish helper -- yes, his identity is ambiguous. But the fact that he is a camp survivor is made clear from his tattoo. That he has false papers is an important point; the regime was all about telling people who they were. When Lore understands that he is a Jew, she immediately tries to put him into the category "Jew" she has been taught: parasite, lecher. But he breaks out of those categories. He refuses to be the person she frames him to be. The fact that we as viewers are anxious to have his identity defined through "papers" puts us unhappily into the same position as the Nazis.
On the whole, this film could disappoint some viewers by not maintaining traditional story structure or temporal structure, by leaving significant things unsaid and unexplained, by avoiding some of the traditional scenes of war films (destroyed cities, fire-fights), by depicting American soldiers in a less than heroic or even congenial way. But if you are a film viewer with patience for non-mainstream filmmaking, this is a profound and beautiful (though sometimes brutal) look at disease.