"Lesbian…
I didn’t know there was such a thing," says Lilly Wust’s father
when learning of his daughter’s intention to live openly with her
Jewish lover Felice Schragenheim. The year was 1944. The place: Berlin.
Lilly was married to a Nazi soldier and had four sons. Under an assumed
German name, Felice worked for the Jewish underground while keeping a
job in the editorial department of a Nazi newspaper. As a fictional
story, a lesbian love affair between a Nazi sympathizer and a Jew in
World War II Berlin would be ingenious, but as a true story, it is
tremendous. Based on the book by Erica Fischer, the film relates a
fascinating, bold, and deeply personal story of a woman's empowerment.
Movies rarely do equal justice to true
stories and the artistic demands of telling them in a memorable
cinematic fashion. Aimée and Jaguar succeeds in both without
sacrificing its esthetic vision to becoming a pulpit for preaching about
homosexuality or the Holocaust, even though both themes are crucial to
the story. The visual style follows the exterior monotony of a city
plagued with frequent air raids; however, the vibrant contrasts are
displayed through the characters of Felice and Lilly who are dazzling in
their dress, behavior, and speech. Felice, especially, wears a lot of
make-up, which accentuates her need to be center stage as the instigator
of fun in the vortex of danger. These two women are riding as high as
possible to claw away at the desperation and repression that surrounds
them.
As a Jew, Felice is taking tremendous
risk by being an active presence in the Berlin social scene. She goes
out to concerts, organizes parties, and uses a high profile Nazi hotel
for her underground activities. In exchange for passports to smuggle
Jews out of the city, Felice also poses nude for playing cards given as
morale boosters to German soldiers on the front.
Lilly, on the other hand, plays a dutiful
German wife and mother to four sons while flaunting herself all over
town in her affairs with Nazi officers. In desperate search of genuine
affection, affair after affair leaves her more bitter. Like most
Germans, she is convinced that Jews are to blame for all her hardships,
real, imagined, and self-inflicted.
The film plods at times forcing us to
anticipate the plot complications, but it does so while establishing a
gripping sense of the historical reality juxtaposed to the emotional
reality of two women who are spiritually ill suited for blind and
passive submission to politics of a fanatical male regime, but neither
has yet reached a sense of freedom that comes with true empowerment.
Felice appears and acts bravely, but she uses risk and danger as an
emotionless abandon that keeps her from true intimacy. Lilly numbs her
romantic longing in a string of affairs with men who make her feel safe,
but she has neither the fulfillment of intimacy nor a sense of her own
integrity.
At first, Felice’s and Lilly’s affair
is just another form of their sensationalist rebellion, but as their
hearts undeniably tie them to each other, neither can deny the awesome
power with which love and Sapphic erotic charge changes their lives.
Even as Felice continues to conceal her Jewish identity from Lilly who
has become completely enchanted with her, she begins to open herself to
the vulnerability of intimacy. In a scene of explosive silence, Felice
confronts Lilly with the truth, and Lilly can only say: "How can
you love me?"
The moment lingers like a refrain of a
distant song, yet its impact is shattering, not because a Jew and a
German dared to live as lesbians in World War II Berlin, but because
only the wet glue of highly charged erotic love in its blinded grip has
the force powerful enough to break bonds of fear and prejudice. Aimée
and Felice stood up boldly to the entrenched insanities of their world,
not to make a statement, but to love and to live fearlessly with their
full hearts.
Website
The official website is one of the most
comprehensive we have ever seen on a movie. It provides excerpts from
Erica Fischer’s book, interview with Lilly Wust who is still alive in
Berlin, production information, and a list of US release dates.
