Starring: Florencia Bado, Àlex Brendemühl, Diego Peretti
Out in Patagonia in 1960, an Argentinian family travel to their new home, opening a hotel amidst the picturesque mountains. Following them to this new destination is a German immigrant doctor (Brendemühl) who has a particular fascination with the family's young girl, Lilithii (Bado). The doctor is Josef Mengele, a man who tortured and experimented on concentration camp inmates for the Nazis, now on the run in Argentina. When Mengele discovers the family is expecting twins (another fascination for him) the situation becomes extremely dangerous.
One of the most regularly visited topics of the aftermath of Nazism to pop up in pop culture is the fates of several prominent Nazis hiding out in South America and it's informed works from Ira Levin's novel, The Boys From Brazil (adapted into a movie in 1978) and The Marathon Man (1976) so in Wakolda, we get a film that deals with the reality of the situation. Some Nazis did indeed go into hiding in South America, including Josef Mengele whose experiments on living (and fully conscious) human beings were horrific. Wakolda spares its audience the full horror of telling too much of Mengele's past, which perhaps to those unfamiliar with him may lessen the impact, but the film imbues such a pervading atmosphere of creepiness that it's still effective.
Some of this creepiness, whilst it works on a purely emotive level comes off as too generalised and unrealistic. The film, naturally, focuses on the not-insignificant population of German-Argentinians and German immigrants in Argentina only fifteen years after World War II ended and you get the sense that the film is just a few details away from a fictional tale of some Nazi colony. Conspiratorial groups of ex-Nazis planning various acts, hushed whispers of an earlier time and institutionalised bigotry and bullying. In one particular scene, a group of schoolboys judge the bodies of the swimming schoolgirls that pass by them. It's uncouth but not something normal teenage boys wouldn't do. Yet in this context, there are Nazi undertones of judging physical prowess and, in a term used to criticise modern media and the fashion industry, "body fascism". It's clever but comes off as maybe an exaggeration of what went on. Still, I'm no expert on these things.
As Josef Mengele, Àlex Brandemühl is a strangely magnetic presence. His performance is understated, possibly because when we see Nazis on screen they're either hammy sadists (Ronald Lacey's Toht in Raiders Of The Lost Ark (1981)....which is excellent) or going maniacs going through some sort of breakdown (Bruno Ganz's Hitler in Downfall (2004)...also excellent). He's quiet and doesn't emote much but just his odd, off-kilter perspective and the vaguely paedophilic undertones of his character (though his fascination with young Lilith seems more scientific than sexual) play on some tensions and unease.
The film is gorgeous to look at. The locations are serene and cinematographer Nicolás Puenzo uses them to the fullest advantage. There's a lot going on visually in the film, especially symbolically (check out the doll factory for starters) but again this almost pushes the film to its detriment. With such an interesting story, you walk,away remembering the film more as a sequence of images without much cohesion. Beautiful to look at, but not making much of an impact. Wakolda's a surprisingly brief film given the subject matter and covers the story fairly well, even if the visuals distract and you probably need a little understanding of the fates of the surviving Nazis and South America's role in such to come to appreciate it. Still, if this sort of thing interest you, I encourage further exploration.
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