‘Blind At Heart’: Tokyo Review

Dir: Barbara Albert. Germany, Austria, Luxembourg. 2023. 136mins.

When we first meet Helene (played by a perpetually luminous Mala Emde, in a role that spans decades), you get the sense that anything is possible for this bright, beautiful young woman. She arrives in Weimar-era Berlin as a 17-year-old, with aspirations of becoming a doctor. But as Nazism tightens its grip on the country, Helene loses touch first with her dreams, and then with her essence and identity. Barbara Albert’s spirited adaptation of Julia Franck’s prize-winning novel ’Die Mittagsfrau’ is a stylish but uneven period piece that explores the sacrifices and impossible choices made in the name of survival.

A stylish but uneven period piece

It’s a handsome, richly textured work from Albert (Nordrand, Free Radicals) that should benefit from the profile of the source material. Franck’s book was an international bestseller that was translated into 37 languages, including English, where it was published with the title ’The Blind Side Of The Heart’. It’s very much a film of two halves, with the lavish, decadent backdrop of late 20s, early 30s Berlin vividly brought to life, while Helene’s later life, with a cartoon-Nazi husband, is rather more crudely drawn. Still, Emde is so magnetic in the central role that she eases the bumpier segments of the story (just as long as audiences can get past the fact that she seems to be immune to the process of ageing). The film, which has already been released domestically, gets its international premiere in competition in Tokyo.

Helene and her sister Martha (Liliane Amuat) are itching to escape from the family home. With the men of the family all lost in the Great War, the house is full of grief, shame and the increasingly erratic behaviour of their mother. By chance, the girls discover that their mother has a sister, Fanny (Fabienne Elaine Hollwege), an exotic and glamorous creature who offers the girls a chance to escape from the home and move to Berlin.

Helene takes a job as an assistant to a pharmacist, with the plan to go on to study medicine; Martha, who is barely off the train before she has discovered the joys of opium-fuelled orgies, revels in the more hedonistic opportunities of the city. And who can blame her? Albert fills the frame with life and colour, captured by a camera that seems as skittish and free-spirited as any of the louche party people that throng to Fanny’s apartment.

The tone, and the colour palette, starts to shift with the death of Helene’s fiancé Karl (Thomas Prenn) during a protest at the Reichstag. The hospital ward, where Helene works as a nurse, is lit in sterile blues and greys to match her mood as she struggles with her grief and the stress of guarding her most dangerous secret: Helene is half-Jewish, on her mother’s side. It’s only a matter of time before her employers demand an Aryan Certificate.

This is where Wilhelm (Max von der Groeben) comes in: a fervent Nazi, Wilhelm is smitten by Helene, and offers her an alternative identity, in return for marriage. She is henceforth known as Alice, she is no longer permitted to work. When she becomes pregnant and bears a son, Wilhelm’s sole contribution to parenting is to handle the fascist indoctrination.

What charm Wilhelm might have possessed evaporates almost immediately following the marriage, making him a rather two-dimensional proposition next to the fully fleshed-out complexity of Helene. But then, this is true of most of the supporting characters, with only Karl registering much depth as a character, and then only briefly. Ultimately, however, the focus on Helene is necessary in order to understand the unimaginable steps that she takes to save herself.