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Review
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Talk about being in the wrong place and the wrong time. Not
only is Berlin resident Felice Schragenheim Jewish, and
female-- she's also a lesbian, who happens to fall for a
sturdy German housewife, Lilly Wust, mother of four
children, and husband of a soldier in the Wehrmacht. To
call this affair "ill-fated" is to call the pope catholic.
Based on a true story, by Lilly, who survived the war and
lived into the late 1990's in Berlin, Aimee and Jaguar are
the pet names Lilly and Felice gave each other. Felice,
amazingly, is a secretary to the editor of a Nazi newspaper,
while feeding information to the underground, and shoot
pornographic photos for the troops. She is a party girl, a
charmer, funny and witty and exuberant, you can see why
Ilse, her lover, becomes jealous of Lilly's relationship
with her. (Remarkably, the film does not conceal the fact
that Lilly probably contributed to Felice's doom with a
well-meant but thoughtlessly stupid act after Felice had
been arrested.) You don't get the sense-- really odd here--
that the film presents any kind of romanticized or
homogenized view of Lilly. It's pretty straight. Perhaps
because she did far worse things that she continues to
conceal, or, more likely, because as an aging, spirited
woman, Lilly didn't care what people thought of her.
Either way, the story is carefully balanced, beautifully
unfolded, touching and compelling.
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