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Variety,
2/9/00
by DENNIS HARVEY
Though its subject
has seen scrutiny before, both nonfiction and dramatic,
docu “Paragraph 175” easily reps the definitive screen chronicle
to date of homosexual persecution under the Third Reich
— particularly via interviews with nearly all the few survivors.
Beyond the striking impact of latter testimonies, latest
feature from Oscar-winning documeisters Rob Epstein and
Jeffrey Friedman (“Common Threads,” “The Celluloid Closet”)
further distinguishes itself by filtering this harsh subject
through exquisitely lyrical craftsmanship. Critical support
should help a tough theatrical sell find specialized release;
broadcast exposure here and in select offshore markets is
assured. Pic won a well-deserved Directing Award from Sundance
doc jury.
Helmers were led
to their subjects — only 12 are still alive, among whom
two declined to participate — by Dr. Klaus Muller, a German
historian and employee of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum.
Muller functions as interviewer here, with survivors’ stories
in English and subtitled German and French. These recollections
are diverse, at times reluctant and often devastating.
Jewish resistance
fighter Gad Beck remembers posing as a Hitler Youth to rescue
his lover, when they were both 18, from a Gestapo transfer
camp. He succeeded — but his boyfriend insisted on staying
behind with his family, none of whom was seen again. Another
man was freed after a stint at Dachau, only to be arrested
again and sent to Buchenwald. A frail, elderly German recalls
hearing a distant “singing forest”: the screams of fellow
Nazi-captured gays, tree-bound and tortured during rural
attempts at flight.
Not every story
is so horrific. The sole woman interviewed (most lesbians
avoided persecution by a Third Reich that largely ignored
their existence) recalls getting a life-saving travel permit
to England — a gift from the Marlene Dietrich look-alike
she had a crush on. Ninety-four-year-old Albrecht Becker
confounds with the confession that he went from a three-year
prison sentence for homosexuality to enlisting in the German
Army — because “that’s where all the men were.”
On the whole, however,
most survivors impress with their willingness to air “uncomfortable
memories” while suggesting the trauma never went away. Shame,
guilt and a sense of obligatory discretion linger. Among
up to 15,000 gays sent to concentration camps, many were
jailed or harassed again after the war thanks to German
anti-sodomy laws not repealed until 1969. (Pic’s title refers
to an anti-gay penal code that survived, in various forms,
over the preceding hundred years.) As yet, their persecution
has received no legal governmental acknowledgement. One
man who spent 8½ years in the camps confides he’d never
told anyone about it until now — maintaining closeted silence
for over a half-century.
As usual, Epstein
and Friedman gracefully weave together a multilevel nonfiction
narrative, using extensive archival footage to background
Germany’s turn-of-the-century proto–gay rights movement,
the “homosexual Eden” of 1920s Weimar era Berlin, Hitler’s
initial “don’t ask, don’t tell” tolerance and his later
switch under pressure to brutal “party cleansing” of all
sexual “degenerates.”
At times the almost
unbearably sad content is leavened by film’s aesthetic elegance,
which deploys sepia tones, slow-motion and apt soundtrack
choices (including Dietrich’s “Falling in Love Again,” plus
the inevitable Wagner excerpt) to create a haunted yet gentle
tenor. Original score by Tibor Szemzo is less effective,
striking an incongruous contempo note with upbeat percussive
fillips. Rupert Everett’s dulcet tones as narrator at first
seem too languorous, but ultimately suit pic’s hushed, sorrowful
tone. Tech package is first-rate.
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