★★★☆☆
Three Stars
In the years after the Second World War, the globe was crossed with ‘ratlines’: a series of escape routes that allowed European fascists to flee to South America. Many were eventually captured and convicted. In 1960, Adolf Eichmann was caught in Argentina by the Israeli intelligence service and hanged in Israel two years later. In 1967, Franz Stangl was arrested in Brazil and extradited to West Germany, where he was sentenced to life imprisonment. But Dr. Josef Mengele, the notorious ‘Angel of Death’, evaded authorities for more than three decades.
Mengele is the subject of Wakolda (The German Doctor), the latest offering from Argentinian director Lucía Puenzo, adapted from her own novel of the same name. It is 1960, and Eva (Natalia Oriero) and Enzo (Diego Peretti) are taking their children to the small Patagonian town of Bariloche to revive Eva’s family hotel.
En route, they encounter a dapper stranger who calls himself Helmut Gregor (Àlex Brendemühl), a doctor from Germany. He takes a great interest in Eva, who is pregnant with twins, and in her underdeveloped daughter, Lilith (Florencia Bado), beginning hormone treatments on her to improve her growth. As the film progresses, the characters are made aware of the doctor’s true identity due to the work of a discerning archivist (the wonderful Elena Roger).
Nazis make great material for cinema, and Nazis on the run even more so. Wakolda is by no means the first time Mengele has been depicted on screen. In 1978, a year before Mengele’s death, Gregory Peck played the doctor in The Boys from Brazil, complete with Laurence Olivier as a Nazi hunter. 2010’s The Debt (starring Jessica Chastain and Helen Mirren) is about Mossad agents hunting ‘The Surgeon of Birkenau’, a character clearly modeled on Mengele.
The story of Mengele has been told and retold, and mythologized so that it is now part of our collective consciousness as a synonym for evil and a marker of the point where scientific ambition leaves nature and morality behind.
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Where Wakolda differs from its Nazi thriller predecessors, and where it succeeds most, is its exploration of a young girl’s sexual and emotional development. Twelve-year-old Lilith is the film’s most complex and captivating character.
Beginning at her new school, Lilith, who is on the brink of adolescence but is alarmingly undersized, is teased for her diminutive figure and called a ‘dwarf’. As she lines up in her swimsuit with her schoolmates before swim class, Lilith is subject to a game in which the boys rate the girls’ bodies. The already shapely and flirtatious girls receive nine or ten; Lilith receives a zero.
Mengele convinces Lilith’s mother that the girl must have hormone treatment as soon as possible because she will soon hit puberty and the hormones will no longer be effective. Soon after beginning her treatment, Lilith menstruates for the first time, and we are shown her bloodstained underwear and her makeshift sanitary pad from toilet paper.
She is fascinated and flattered by the handsome, mysterious doctor, and has her first experiences of desire and sexual contact with a young boy, Otto. At times, we get the impression that the familiar, oft-told story of Mengele is an excuse to explore much more intimate subject matter.
Filmed in the snow-capped Patagonian mountains, the film’s other great strength is its sublime scenery, and its sheer visual magnificence. This landscape is contrasted with the unnatural activity of its inhabitants: Mengele’s monstrous experiments and Enzo’s eerie doll-making business. But this is not a simple dichotomy between the beauty of nature and the immorality of human ambitions.
The natural world is never kind or compassionate in this film. In one of the first scenes, the family and the doctor are forced to seek shelter from a storm. Later, when Eva gives birth prematurely to her twins, no medical help is available because of a blizzard. Rather than simply underscoring Mengele’s evil, or suggesting that human cruelty is an aberration, the film reminds us that nature itself can be indifferent, or worse, cruel and hostile.
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At times Puenzo can be heavy-handed. Mengele’s speech about the Sonnenmenschen, for example, is a transparent reminder that he was a bad guy with bad aspirations, as if we didn’t know that already. The close-ups of Mengele’s journal, complete with Lilith’s voiceover narrating the events, sometimes feel clumsy and obvious. Lilith’s father makes dolls with artificially beating hearts for a living—an occupation which is far too neat and cute a rhyme with Nazi racial aspirations.
Still, even the father’s occupation is redeemed by a genuinely unnerving scene in a doll factory, where rows of workers produce identical figures, crafting their artificial lips, eyes, and hair: an army of flawlessly constructed girls at odds with Enzo’s own underdeveloped daughter.
Aside from these touches, for the most part the film is understated, rarely ostentatious, and far too cold and detached to descend into Nazi-hunter type theatrics. Brendemühl is a chilling Mengele, but he does relatively little besides glower: he is more of a threatening presence than an actual character. The film is altogether less interested in the German doctor than in the experiences of its girls and women, and at times Mengele feels almost like an unnecessary addition. As a Nazi thriller Wakolda doesn’t quite get there, but as a portrayal of the strange, distressing experiences of growing up, it is uncomfortably accurate.
