Our August Sunday Corner with Lee Liberman: David Leveaux's THE EXCEPTION

Q: Can an officer have a loyalty greater 

to anything other than his country?

A: First he must ask the questions...

What is my country? 

And does it even still exist?

The 2016 film, THE EXCEPTION, streaming now on Netflix, is a World War II drawing-room melodrama with dashes of thriller thrown in that offers another small story told at a distance from the war theater and its central tragedy.

The film gives voice to the consternation, in fact grief, of some Germans as they glimpsed their upright, organized culture devolving into a torture machine (and timed with our own fears about democracy).

This is a first film-outing for David Leveaux, admired and loved for his theater direction in England and on Broadway, here using a screenplay by Simon Burke based on Alan Judd’s 2003 novel, The Kaiser’s Last Kiss.

Kaiser Wilhelm II (Christopher Plummer) and his second wife, Hermine (Janet McTeer), above, are exiles living on a Dutch estate near Utrecht early in the war mid-1940. There he rails at those who cried for war all those years ago, ignoring his orders, bringing on World War I. Now he spends his days taking daily briefings from his loyal aide, Col. Ilsemann (Ben Daniels), chopping wood (an obsession), and feeding the ducks, who do not blame him for losing the first world war or his throne. 

Brandt, a German captain with a stomach full of shrapnel, has been recalled from the battlefield in Poland under suspicious circumstances (he should have been court-martialed if not shot). He gets off easy with new orders to Utrecht to head the Kaiser’s personal bodyguard (below).

Brandt is hunky Australian Jai Courtney (Divergent, Suicide Squad), very convincing, showing us through his eyes and his nightmares that he follows orders but takes exception to murderous excess. Here he meets Dutch maid, Mieke (Lily James of Downton Abbey), providing the ingredients for a sexy, dangerous coupling.

If the pair are the heart of this story, the elders are its soul. Wilhelm and Hermine are so well-written and played, they hold their own against the furtive lovers. (Plummer is now nearly ninety and grand; McTeer, always working, much awarded yet shunning celebrity, is priceless and perfect in her constant conniving over Wilhelm’s well-being and late career.)

Brandt (the moving force here) and the local Utrecht gestapo are tasked with uncovering an English spy in the area. (Wilhelm is sly: “We must alert the ducks”.) After a visit to Mieke’s room, Brandt finds gun oil on a cigarette pack he had dropped on her table (nearly everybody in WWII chain smokes). Presently the household is in a tizzy preparing for the visit of Heinrich Himmler; the estate must be searched top to bottom. Brandt stakes out Mieke’s room but finds nothing there to do with gun oil.

At dinner, Himmler (Eddie Marsan, below), who has come to ask Wilhelm to return to Berlin as figure head, chats about ongoing research in Potsdam to industrialize murder —the present killing of 10 persons per minute by injecting carbolic acid is inefficient. Some at table turn pale at this talk.

There are twists and turns with the spy thing, two offers to the Kaiser (one delivered by Himmler, the second messaged from Winston Churchill), a bumbling chase with Nazis yelling and 1940-era cars barreling to and fro, and hopeful prospects for the lovers who must part. But despite theatrics that are more silly than thrilling, the drawing room and backstairs doings elevate the reward to Downton Abbey-level satisfaction (which is to say very entertaining but not Wolf Hall or Gosford Park).

The romance offers a rare, perfectly erotic few moments and a screaming fight (he: you used me; she: I used myself), making you want this pair to end up together; and Wilhelm and Hermine conjure magic of their own. Lily James, in The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society and Cinderella, could not put a princessly foot wrong but although appealing here, she’s too much the ingenue for the steely business at hand.

But no matter, the film has its charms and one imagines that director Leveaux will make the thrills in his next film as good as the interpersonals (that is, make the former either more thrilling or more satiric). As it is, the domestic affairs that play out in this bit of imagined drama are well worth the flaws.

The real Kaiser, below, (grandson of England’s Queen Victoria) never went anywhere — he died in June 1941 at his Dutch estate (one imagines as a complication of smoking).

The above post is written by our 

monthly correspondent, Lee Liberman

Florian Gallenberger's JOHN RABE: the real-life, World War II, good German

Old-fashioned epics in the biography/
history mode are so rare these days that a good one like the recent German film JOHN RABE (pronounced Rah-buh) is reason enough to send up an Annunciation flare. Written and directed by Florian Gallenberger (shown below, clutching his "Oscar" for Quiero Ser [I Want to Be], which won Best Short Film-Live Action back in 2001), the movie tells a tale (perhaps not the tale, but close enough for jazz) of a real-life German businessman who had the moral strength and courage, despite his being a huge Hitler-lover, to stand up for Chinese refuges during the slaughter that has come to be known as The Rape of Nanking.

If you're an inveterate movie-goer, you will probably already know about Herr Rabe from other recent films: Chuan Lu's Nanjing! Nanjing! (City of Life and Death) and the 2007 semi-documentary Nanking.  Here, however, we see a much fuller Rabe and understand better how important was his work for the safety of the Chinese people trapped in the city when the Japanese took it over in 1937.  The movie, I believe, telescopes time and and events somewhat (the entire film takes in but two months at the end of that year), but the effect only captures our attention that much more, pulling us strongly into the narrative.

The choice of events that Gallenberger shows us cements the time, place and importance of what is going on so absolutely in our psyches that I suspect anyone who views the film will always remember what happened here. And though the filmmaker sees to it that, yes, there are both good and bad Germans and Japanese shown, it is more than clear in this case that the Japanese were responsible for mass slaughter and atrocities for which that coun-
try, to this day, has yet to declare and/or take its full responsi-
bility  (Japan, meet Turkey!)  As genocidal as were the Nazi toward the Jews, this film makes it clear that the Japanese were equally so toward the Chinese.  (It's little wonder the film proved so popular in Germany: At last an entire -- and almost entirely successful -- movie devoted to a good German during WWII!)

Ironically, it was because of the close ties between Japan and Germany that Rabe, as a German, could manage to exercise some control and protection over, first, the Chinese workers in the Siemens factory in Nanking that he had charge over, and later up to 200,000 refugees. In the first attack we see in the film, it is by unfurling a huge Nazi flag (above), under which the workers gather, that Rabe is able to save their lives during an aerial bombing.

Gallenberger uses occasional newsreel footage along with his filmed narrative -- the coupling works quite well -- and his art director and set designers have done a yeoman job of creating the period of the late 1930s.  Occasionally, a scene will smack of "commerce."  As exciting as is the chase of the suddenly-Japanese-uniformed Chinese girl Langyu (played by the lovely Jingchu Zhang, above, right) into her girl's dormitory, when the commanding officer orders all the girls to strip naked, you can practically hear the voice of a producer whispering, "Find a way to work in some nudity, and I'll bankroll your movie."

Ditto the almost love story between Langyu and her young German Jew (Daniel Brühl, doing penance for his nasty Nazi of Inglorious Basterds).  Yet so involved do we become with these characters, all of whom are very well acted, I suspect you'll allow the events and performances to carry you along.  Among the fine cast, it's a partic-
ular pleasure to see Steve Buscemi (above, right) play a relatively buttoned-down role as an American physician practicing in Nanking, as well as the fine French actress Anne Consigny (above, left), as one of the strongest forces for good in this imperiled city, while Dagmar Manzel (below, left) is the steadfast and loving Dora Rabe.

In the role of Rabe himself, Gallenberger was lucky to have enticed the man who may be Germany's finest actor working today: Ulrich Tukur (shown above, right, and below).  You've seen him recently in roles quite varied -- from The White Ribbon to Séraphine and North Face. As Rabe, he is altogether different: quiet, self-effacing and only slowly rising to the challenge at hand.  What a marvelous actor this fellow is; he has you following his smallest change of thought and feeling without ever striking a false note.  If the rest of the cast and the story itself were not so commanding, Herr Tukur alone would make this film a must-see.

John Rabe, via Strand Releasing,  begins its theatrical run today, May 21, in New York City, at the Quad Cinema, on Long Island at the Malverne Cinema, and in Queens at the Kew Gardens Cinema. On June 4, the film will open in Los Angeles at the Laemmle Music Hall 3, the Laemmle Town Center 5 in Encino and the Regal Edwards Westpark 8 in Irvine.