Writer/director Amma Asante has carved out a compelling niche for herself as a cinematic interpreter, or re-interpreter, of history, based around the realization that she can challenge entrenched historical narratives simply by giving a voice to mixed-race persons in the past, either in true stories or heavily researched fictions. The fact that her latest, “Where Hands Touch,” has already attracted some controversy, sight unseen, proves that interracial romance can still be seen as politically inconvenient, complicating narratives that we wish were simple. However, it’s also true that no matter how good the intentions, using concentration camps as the backdrop to a love story is of questionable taste and artistically self-defeating.
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“Where Hands Touch” tells the story of Leyna (Amandla Stenberg), the teenage daughter of a German mother and a black French soldier who occupied the Rhineland following WWI. Having never known her father, or anyone at all who shares her skin tone, Leyna is at something of a loss to understand why she is treated differently when being a regular German is all she has ever known or aspired to. Her mother (Abbie Cornish) moves Leyna and her (fully German) little brother to Berlin in 1944, hoping that in the city they can better blend in. Living with the knowledge that the knock on the door of the SS might come at any moment, as it does for many Jewish neighbors, they strive to be as normal as they can until Leyna falls in love with Lutz (George MacKay).
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Lutz is the son of a prominent, yet atypical, SS officer (Christopher Eccleston) who not only commits the crime of possessing “criminal” American art like a Billie Holliday record but whose own WWI experiences have made him cynical to war, in general. Lutz himself is burning to fight the Russians, but his father wants to save him from his own mistakes and instructs him to “wear the mask you need to survive the war.” The war soon comes for all of them, as Lutz is called up to serve and, in a terribly contrived turn of events, both he and his father find themselves running the very camp where Leyna is sent.
The parts of the film in Berlin are mostly successful in portraying an unknown perspective on the horrors of Nazism. Leyna and her family are subjected to indignity after indignity, all the while counting themselves lucky that they aren’t Jewish. The film’s most heartbreaking scenes show characters like Leyna adopting the Reich’s hateful rhetoric towards others to deflect attention from their own difference. The dynamics amongst the family are complex and fascinating, from Leyna’s brother torn between a childlike love of family and his intuition of dangerous difference, from Leyna’s painfully probing questions about her unknown father. Cornish gives a fierce performance as a mother fighting to preserve her family, not only from the outside but also from the insidious racism that she can’t fully prevent them from internalizing. After already spending a lifetime fighting prejudice against herself, she now has to see it through her children’s eyes and try to stamp it out once again. Leyna’s lack of power makes this mostly a reactive role, but Stendberg does well in these understated confines, communicating with her eyes and body language what she cannot say aloud.
But once the action moves to the camp, the enormity of the historical events portrayed completely overwhelms Asante’s story and characters. The troubling, but intriguing, power imbalance the two lovers had in Berlin curdles into something toxic and repellent when one is an SS guard with absolute power over the other. Putting aside the mountain of ethical reasons to avoid this scenario, no one wants a protagonist with zero agency. While Asante does give Leyna some small acts of kindness and rebellion, the reality of life (and constant death) in the camp demolish the basis of most of the ideas that made the first half interesting and makes the second half of the movie a grim procession to a contrived ending.
“Where Hands Touch” has many fine moments that show the tragedy of living under a racist state, not only the constant threat of physical violence but the insidious poison that seeps into interactions big and small. Every character must negotiate their own boundaries while trying to hold on to what, and whom, they love, and the detailed portrait of that struggle saves the movie from its second half mistakes. [C+]
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