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Much praise has been given to this adaptation by screenwriter David Hare and director Stephen Daldry of Bernhard Schlink's 1995 novel Der Vorleser, or The Reader - the German title has the sense of 'reader-aloud'.
Everyone involved in this film is of the highest possible calibre, but their combined and formidable talents could not annul my queasiness that the question of Nazi war guilt and the death camps had been reimagined in terms of a middlebrow sentimental-erotic fantasy. This was, I admit, a problem I had with the original novel, and the movie treatment has not alleviated it.
Its full, questionable nature emerges as the narrative unfolds; those fearful of spoilerism had better look away now.
Kate Winslet gives a typically intelligent performance as Hanna, a sturdy, unprepossessing woman in a provincial town in 1950s West Germany; she is employed as a tram conductor.
One rainy day, she chances upon Michael (David Kross), a teenage boy shivering, throwing up and almost delirious with undiagnosed fever in the courtyard of her apartment building.
With brisk and motherly can-do, she mops his brow, sloshes away the sick with a bucket of water and makes sure he gets home all right.
Some months later, after a lonely recuperation, he comes back to her flat with a bunch of flowers to say thank you. They end up having a glorious affair, and their passionate lovemaking is accompanied with a ritual hardly less erotic - she loves him to read aloud to her from the classics: Chekhov, Homer, Rilke.
But one day, Hanna mysteriously vanishes and it is only many years later that Michael, now a law student, is astonished to see her again, older and greyer - in the dock.
For Hanna was an SS camp guard at Auschwitz, one of half a dozen who committed a particular, atrocious mass murder, described in the bestselling memoir of a Holocaust survivor. Michael is horrified to hear testimony that Hanna liked to pick and choose 'favourites' from among the prisoners who were forced to come to her quarters to read to her.
It is only now that Michael realises that Hanna is illiterate. As an older man, played by Ralph Fiennes, Michael must come to terms with his feelings of horror at being violated, at having his own capacity for forming relationships stunted, mingled with pity and even tenderness for this vilified creature.
Hanna's condition is by no means a metaphor for the moral illiteracy of Nazism. She is shown as being the only honest defendant among the guards on trial; she silences the presiding judge with a heartfelt: "What would you have done?"
She only takes the blame for having written a mendacious SS report, and therefore having been the guards' ringleader, because disproving it would mean submitting a handwriting specimen - and Hanna is still ashamed of being illiterate.
The dramatic and emotional structure of the film insidiously invites us to see Hanna's secret misery as a species of victimhood that, if not exactly equivalent to that of her prisoners, is certainly something to be weighed thoughtfully in the balance, and to see a guilt-free human vulnerability behind war crimes.
The movie boldly flashes backwards and forwards between Michael's youth and middle age, but there are no flashbacks to the Auschwitz era, so we cannot judge the central facts of Hanna's life and behaviour, and her continuing silence on the subject of anti-Semitism is never challenged.
Kate Winslet participates in the Hollywood tradition of having the Nazi played by a Brit; she is very good, and in fact no purely technical objections could conceivably be levelled in any direction. But I can't forgive this film for being so shallow and so obtuse on such a subject, and I can't accept it as a parable for war-guilt-by-association suffered by goodish Germans of the next generation.
