Germany Year Zero

Saw Germany Year Zero, a not-very-cheery film about the dehumanizing effects of poverty. The film was made in 1948 and is cleverly set in post-war Germany. This allows the audience to slowly feel sympathy for the starving, rationed, over-worked Germans. We are wheedled and coaxed into rooting for them and then the dehumanization comes about and everyone becomes the feral animals that lurk just under the surface. The film revolves around a young boy who lives with his sister, older brother, and bed-ridden father. The older brother is was in the army and now hides for fear of being put in a POW camp. His bed-ridden father cannot work, so it's up to his sister (who earns money in an off-screen but obvious way that involves makeup and bars) and the boy to keep the house together.

The boy meets a deeply creepy, Fagin-style man who introduces him to a rough but amiable troupe of boys. They run little scams and steal potatoes and pass around a teenage moll who has no parents. The boy is earning money but he's sinking into a seedy criminal underworld. The Fagin-dude was seriously touchy-feely with the boy. This is clearly not a good situation. To me however, his life of crime seemed to be not only his best choice, but his only choice. In an early scene police officers shoo away enterprising looters from the corpse of a horse. Life is hard everywhere.

Eventually, things reach a breaking point. The sister starts in on the older brother, nagging him for not working but eating plenty. He attacks her over her profession. The father begins loudly wishing he were dead and condemns everyone for allowing his youngest son to fall into a life of crime. The boy sits in the center of the maelstrom, feeling personally responsible. The ending is tragic as of course it must be.

The film is intelligent and clever. It sometimes smacks of exploitation, but the sympathy double-cross reversals lift the film out of misery-porn and into something deeper. The settings of the film are always crumbling buildings or rooms with open holes in the walls. Everyone is desperate to not be the crab at the bottom of the pot and cruelly sneer at each other on almost any pretext. During the climax, these tensions reach even into the heart of the little family who are our heroes and the results are disastrous. Definitely a downer of a film. It was very similar to The Bicycle Thief, not only in plot and setting (ie: ruins,) but also in its harsh, unromantic style.