The Promise. - movie reviews

National Review, Oct 9, 1995 by John Simon

THERE is a moment in Margaretthe von Trotta's The Promise (Das Versprechen) that alone is worth the price of admission. I'll tell you about it in a moment.

The Promise is the story of Konrad and Sophie, young lovers separated by the Berlin Wall. It spans the highlights and low points of 28 years in their lives, and conveys a lot more besides through the subsidiary characters who animate the background, as troubling and affecting as those in the foreground. The screenplay is by Peter Schneider, the respected novelist whose The Wall Jumper is a classic of Wall literature. It has its lapses -- mostly the all-too-easy dismissal of interesting figures. But there is also much of consequence as individuals aim their flashlight's-worth of courage at the all-engulfing darkness.

In 1961, Sophie, Konrad, and four other youths are making their carefully planned nocturnal escape from East to West Berlin through the sewers. The last one about to go through a manhole, Konrad, hesitates. His shoelace has become untied, as it often does; worse: his resolve has loosened, and the police van on night patrol is coming. He lets himself be caught and, eventually, continues his promising work in an astrophysical laboratory. Yearning letters cross the Wall as Sophie finds shelter and employment with a fashion-designer aunt.

Some years later, Konrad accompanies his superiors to a Prague science congress, and arranges for Sophie to join him there. The outdoor statue at which they are to meet exists in duplicate, and the way the lovers almost fail to connect is suspenseful and, finally, exhilarating. They consummate their interrupted affair and Sophie gets pregnant. Yet their plans to become united are foiled again, in part through events in the Czech capital. For it is 1968, and Russian tanks flatten the Prague Spring. Separated again, Sophie decides that they must start independent lives.

It is 1980, and Konrad, now head of his laboratory, is to present an important paper in West Berlin. He is married, with a small daughter. Sophie lives with a French journalist, Gerard, and Alexander, her 12-year-old son by Konrad. The meeting of these good, bewildered people is both moving and anticlimactic, like so many big moments in life. Nothing changes, except that the East German authorities, for sinister reasons I can't go into, allow Alexander to make visits to his father, and here is another unforgettable little scene.

Konrad's wife complains bitterly that their daughter may become disturbed by Alexander's comings. Thus the boy has promised to take the girl to the West Berlin zoo, to show her the pandas, a toy version of which he brought her as a present. But the girl can't get a travel permit. So he'll take her to the local zoo, says Konrad. Yes, but this one has no pandas. So what, it's just another kind of bear. And the next shot, at night, shows Konrad painstakingly painting the toy panda all black.

I skip the stuff about Konrad's fearless sister, an anti-Communist preacher whose husband wants to defect to the West, just as I skipped the conflict of ideologies in the laboratory, and the business with Konrad's father and the police. Now it is night again, in 1989, and there is an uproar in the streets of East Berlin. Awakened, Konrad staggers to the balcony, and from one of the many other balconies, all abuzz, a neighbor calls out, "The Wall is down!" At which -- and, for me, this is the moment -- Konrad dazedly asks, "Welche Mauer?" Which wall? People who have lived with a life-destroying terror for decades cannot imagine that it is over when it finally is. Perhaps they are like the woman being interviewed at a spot where the Wall used to be, while others mingle in jubilant ecstasy. "For me," she says, her face furrowed by history, "it is too late."

Is it too late for Sophie and Konrad as well? The ending is ambiguous. What is unambiguous is the skill in the writing, directing, and acting. The actors playing the young Konrad and Sophie blend seamlessly into those playing their older selves. From a fine cast, I single out Corinna Harfouch as the older Sophie. An actress from Brecht's Berliner Ensemble, she combines understated beauty with strongly projected intelligence. Fittingly, the film ends with a closeup of her noble, careworn face, as lived-in as any I have ever seen.