From Hilde, with Love

Based on the true story of Hilde Coppi, a Communist and resistance fighter who defied the Nazi regime by broadcasting programmes from Radio Moscow, this film explores her resistance, arrest and the imprisonment she endured for her beliefs. Whilst the story and intentions with the film are admirable, it feels like a slog rather than an exploration of a freedom fighter’s sacrifice.

This film achieves a compounding sense of bleakness, one that makes it hard to feel much emotion beyond gnawing despair. Potentially powerful drama is ironically undercut by such a dense gloom that you begin to wish it would hurry up and get to the end.

The disconnect is not helped by a selection of characters who, whilst noble in their political battles, lack anything distinctly human about them, and end up solely as mouthpieces for their beliefs. The story of resistance in Nazi Germany is of obvious significance, but it is not enough to keep the film’s narrative afloat. Were it a documentary that would likely be different, but as a scripted drama it relies too much on the narrative of the war itself, doing little to differentiate the slog the characters go through and the audience’s experience of it.

Further difficulties with emotional investment arise from the film’s structure, which shuffles the timeframe to a seismic degree, seemingly for no reason. Characters reference events and encounters as having already happened when we’re introduced to them, events we don’t sometimes see until forty minutes later. This creates confusion at the first reference, and annoyance when we eventually see what little impact most of these encounters have to the overall narrative.

The film’s saving grace ironically is its bleakest portion, the story of Coppi’s imprisonment whilst heavily pregnant. Being furthest along in the timeline, it is told in chronological order. Free of the bizarre out-of-order theatricality of the rest of the film, viewers can settle into a more controlled, if formulaic, prison narrative.

From Hilde is a very earnest and respectful film that tries to tell the story of an ordinary person making the ultimate sacrifice in war. It succeeds in making us recognise that the filmmakers’ intentions are honourable, but it relies too often on despair to allow full engagement with it.