Heart to heart

Aimée & Jaguar goes beyond lesbian love

by Jeffrey Gantz

AIMÉE & JAGUAR. Directed by Max Färberböck. Written by Max Färberböck and Rona Munro, based on the book by Erica Fischer. With Maria Schrader, Juliane Köhler, Johanna Wokalek, Heike Makatsch, Elisabeth Degen, Detlev Buck, Inge Keller, Kyra Mladeck, Margit Bendokat, Jochen Stern, and Peter Weck. At the Avon.

The opening-night entry at last year's Berlin Film Festival and a box-office hit in Germany, Max Färberböck's based-in-fact movie about the World War II amour between hausfrau Lilly Wust and journalist/resistance fighter Felice Schragenheim would seem to have everything going for it. Heroic resistance to the Nazis, a feel-good romance between Aryan and Jew that's also a doomed romance, straight sex, lesbian sex -- you name it, it's here. Except the film doesn't have Gwyneth Paltrow and Julia Roberts as the title heroines. And it's in German. Maybe that's why it never found an American distributor. Now it's getting two weeks at the Brattle and an open-ended run at the Coolidge Corner. Maybe it'll become the lesbian Casablanca.

Not that this is a movie for gay audiences only. Told in flashback, it's framed by the meeting, in a retirement home in 1997, of the aged Lilly (Inge Keller, superb) and Felice's friend Ilse (Kyra Mladeck, ditto); and it's Ilse who takes us back to 1943 and Allied-devastated Berlin. The young Lilly (Juliane Köhler) doesn't hesitate to treat herself to male company while her husband, Günther (Detlev Buck), is off at the Eastern front, but that changes when she gets a love letter from Felice (Maria Schrader), who works for a Nazi newspaper under the name Felice Schrader. Gradually a passionate romance develops; they write to each other under the pen names Aimée (Lilly) and Jaguar (Felice). When Günther discovers the affair, Lilly divorces him and Felice moves in. Lilly's own eventual discovery that Felice is Jewish changes nothing, but then, inevitably, the Nazis track down Felice and ship her off to Theresienstadt. The real Lilly Wust, now 86, was a guest at the 1999 Berlin premiere; Felice's fate is unknown.

At times Aimée & Jaguar teeters on the brink of made-for-TV-moviedom. We see Lilly and Felice playing with Lilly's children, biking along the Havel, swimming and taking photos and making love, all of it backed by Jan A.P. Kaczmarek's wistful but manipulative score. They could have been happy forever, the film seems to suggest, if it hadn't been for the damned war, and the damned Nazis, and for that matter damned men -- the film has scarcely a single guy any viewer would want to identify with, though you may feel for Nazi editor Keller (Peter Weck) when, weighing the common defense against domestic tranquillity, he tells Felice, "We shot down 41 Allied planes last night, but my toilet is gone."

What classes up Aimée & Jaguar are the performances of Köhler and Schrader, who shared (and deserved) the Berlin Film Fest's Best Actress award. Köhler gives Lilly a silly, fussy exterior ("Frau Wust behaved like a teenager" when getting ready for an extramarital "date," Ilse tells us) beneath which there's a tender heart but also a nasty temper (she shouts at her children as well as Felice). Sometimes this Lilly seems all surface -- her jittery, girlish fluttering when she's about to plunge into a cold lake, or trying to hide her legs from Felice's camera. And sometimes she's fathomless -- her obvious distress when she appears at her birthday party in an elaborate frock and Felice, in white tie and top hat, leads her out to dance. Schrader, who's a kind of dark-haired Hanna Schygulla, fully justifies Ilse's description: "Felice was lots of people -- no sooner did I get hold of one than I was betrayed by another." Nothing could be simpler, or more touching, than Felice's late-in-the-day declaration to Lilly, "Ich bin Jude." Yet she's radiant one moment, moody the next, as if happiness were a butterfly that keeps flitting out of reach.

In the end, too, Max Färberböck rises above no TV-movie direction. He shrouds many key scenes in shadow, as if to suggest there are dark corners in every heart. Felice dumps Ilse (Johanna Wokalek) for Lilly ("That night, Lilly took Felice away from me," Ilse recalls); Ilse's subsequent frustration clouds their happiness. Felice's other Jewish lesbian friends, Klara (Heike Makatsch) and Lotte (Elisabeth Degen), also feel abandoned, and indeed it's Felice who hustles Ilse and Klara away when Lotte, trailing behind them, is stopped and shot. Later, we see Felice and Lilly teaching downstairs neighbors Herr Lause (Jochen Stern) and Frau Jäger (Margit Bendokat) to rumba; but when Felice is taken away, Frau Jäger denies her Jewish friend -- just as Simon Peter denied his.

And in closing the frame story, Färberböck makes it clear that it's more than just the Nazis' persecution of Jews and lesbians that denied Lilly and Felice. "Did she sleep with you again?" a still-anguished Lilly asks Ilse. "One is a stupid number," Ilse replies. "It's never enough. That's the problem." Resignation, reconciliation, and a final flashback to a party where everybody's playing cards and an exuberant Felice, asked what she wants, says, "Everything. Not 'forever.' Just 'now.' " If she'd thought more about "forever," or even "tomorrow," Felice might have survived. But that heartbreaking, irresistible "now" would surely have meant the end for "Aimée" and "Jaguar."

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Juliane & Maria

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