JOHN RABE
"John Rabe" is German writer-director Florian Gallenberger’s David and Goliath heart-pounding film. It is the true story of a small international committee responsible for saving half the population of
Gallenberger brings to the screen with remarkable restraint, just as entertaining a fact-based, classic epic as any of the currenly popular fantasy and cartoony pictures. A cross between “Shindler’s List and “Blackbook,” the experience is both transporting and hair-raising. And it inevitably asks the question, “what would I do in these circumstances?”
The film is based on Rabe’s personal diaries that were published years after the war as "The Good German of Nanking." The austere, middle-aged civilian, Rabe, reluctantly goes about his quiet, heroic civilian deeds even after given the choice of returning home to Germany when his factory is about to be closed down.
Having joined the Nazi Party in order to obtain funding for a school in China, John Rabe makes better use of his party affiliation clout and business acumen to create and then supervise one of the International Safety Zones during the Japanese devestation of Nanking. The zones save over 200,000 lives while 300,000 lives were lost.
High energy, international film director Ballenberger had no support in making the film from Germans, Chinese or Japanese. He says, “it was touchy in all three of those countries. For Germans (and the allied countries!) it’s a ‘Nazi’ who’s the hero. For the Japanese, the
Gellenberger made the film “to pay tribute to Rabe and because I think it’s still an important story today, especially when people are not standing up for what’s right, because he did something which was pretty outstanding….he fought for what he thought was right,” and surprising as it was overcame the odds.
That the film was made at all is a tribute to Gellenberger’s persistence and smarts since he had to obtain funding from at least a dozen companies, as seen in the credits. He worked beautifully with director of photography Jurgen Jurges and Production designers Juhua Tu, Xinram Tu, Marcus Wellendorf,Editor: Hansjorg Weissbrich bring the story to life on screen..
One early and most surprising image in the film is Rabe’s brainstorm to use a giant Nazi flag to deflect Japanese bombers away from desperate civilians crammed into the Siemens factory grounds. The twists and turns of the story only begin here. Rabe, eventually exonerated by the Allies because of his good deeds, also died impoverished.
The natural and convincing multi-lingual cast that easily switches from one language to another, is awe-inspiring in terms of globalism.
Leading German actor, Ulrich Tukur, portrays Rabe as the ultimate German bureaucrat, fair yet condescending to his employees, who becomes the embodiment of the saying that war brings extraordinary things out of ordinary people. Dagmar Manzel plays Rabe’s loving, devoted wife , who bears in spirit and looks an uncanny resemblance to Liz Sheridan, Seinfeld’s mother) and brings out the romantic in him.
Steve Buscemi is nothing less than brilliant as cynical, worn out American physician Dr. Robert Wilson, who Rabe chooses as his deputy. Teruyuki Kagawa as Prince Asaka, uncle of the Emperor, architect of the devastation, barks out every venomous order, typical of the Japanese language style that showed power.
Other committee members are romantic, young, embittered diplomat, Dr. Georg Rosen (Daniel Bruhl) who embodies the disenfranchised yet loyal German Jew and Valerie Dupres (Anne Consigny) is the idealistic French College Director. Lovely, lithe Zhang Jingchu is a bold College student and photographer who risks death and the rapacious Japanese to feed her brother.
Laemmle Theatres. 134 minutes
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