4 Tage im Mai (4 Days in May)
2011
*½
Director: Achim von Borries
Cast: Paul Wenzel, Alexei Guskov, Ivan Shvedov, Andrew Merzlikin, Sergei Legostaev, Gerald Alexander Held, Martin Brambach, Angelina Henchy, Petra Kelling
World cinema knows many poignant and gripping stories about the Second World War. This irrelevant and extremely uneventful footnote of history is not one of them. It's set in the last few days of the war when a small Soviet recon squad takes over a German orphanage by the Baltic Sea, while a Wehrmacht unit on the nearby beach waits for the inevitable capitulation. The events are seen through the eyes of a 13-year-old German boy who conveniently speaks fluent Russian (which he learned from his aunt whose own language skills are so poor that she had to be dubbed). This German/Russian co-production is like few other WW2 movies: sweet, inoffensive, non-threatening and ultimately uplifting. It claims to be based on a true story, but it depicts nothing I've come to know about the occupation of Germany.
