Aimée & Jaguar

It was the opening-night film at last year's Berlin Film Festival, and it's been a box-office hit in Germany (the critics were less enthusiastic), but Max Färberböck's Berlin-made adaptation of Erica Fischer's novel about the true-story World War II amour between hausfrau Lilly Wust and Jewish resistance fighter Felice Schragenheim has yet to find an American distributor. Fortunately, it's turned up as the opening film in the Museum of Fine Arts' "New German Films" series, so Boston audiences will get at least one shot at it.

Aimée & Jaguar flies on the performances of its lead actresses, Maria Schrader as Felice and Juliane Köhler as Lilly (they shared the Berlin festival's Best Actress award). It's late 1943: Lilly's husband, Günther, is off at the front, and she doesn't hesitate to treat herself to male company in his absence, but that all changes when she gets a love letter from Felice, who works for a Nazi newspaper under the name Felice Schrader (one of the film's many smart touches). Gradually a passionate romance develops. When Günther discovers the affair and explodes, Lilly divorces him and Felice moves in. Lilly's own discovery, that Felice is Jewish, changes nothing, but inevitably the Nazis track down Felice and ship her off to Theresienstadt. The real Lilly Wust, now 85, was a guest at the premiere last February; Felice's fate is unknown.

What makes the film is the intensity between Schrader (in a performance that would do Hanna Schygulla credit) and Köhler, but that's also what unmakes it: Lilly and Felice (or "Aimée" and "Jaguar," as they address each other in letters) are all emotion and little thought. They could have been happy forever, Aimée & Jaguar implies, if it hadn't been for the damned war, and the damned Nazis, and for that matter damned men (the film has scarcely a single guy any viewer would want to identify with). It's not hard to see what attracted German audiences: they get to root for the lovers while dissociating themselves from the cardboard Nazis. Indeed, when Lilly and Felice start frolicking in Berlin's green suburbs, bicycling and swimming and taking photos, this film threatens to turn into a German TV-movie. But the Brideshead Revisited-like score gives it class, the doings of Felice's friends Ilse, Klara, and Lotte ground it in Berlin's polymorphous sexuality, and the close of the frame story, where the now aged Lilly and Ilse are reunited, wipes away all sentimentality. Not a great film, but a serious, unsettling one -- let's hope the Brattle or the Kendall Square gives it a real run. At the Museum of Fine Arts January 20.

-- Jeffrey Gantz