Dreißig Minuten

Anonyma: Eine Frau in Berlin (A woman in Berlin)

(2008)

This topped at least one best-films-of-2009 (more or less) list that I know of, and I'm hard-pressed to deny it. Yet it's easy to understand why Germany didn't put it forward as its foreign-film Oscar nomination. As the end credits tell us, the memoir on which the film is based stirred national outrage when it was published in 1959, and the author herself suppressed it (and her identity) afterward.

If this were merely a film about the quest of a woman and a defeated city to survive at any cost the onslaught of rapacious Russians, it would be a powerful document of time and place. But what lifts it above even the best of the war-is-hell subgenre is a shocking turn it takes from that narrative, one that I don't want to specify so that you can be shocked by it too. Suffice it to say that this is one of those miraculous films that repeatedly teases you into thinking you've seen this before and you know where it's going next, then repeatedly yanks the rug out from underneath your conventional expectations.

Astonishing performances, too, from Nina Hoss and Yevgeni Sidikhin, neither of whom I've ever seen before, though I wouldn't be surprised to see at least Hoss again, and a wonderful almost silent turn (save for a memorable song) by one Viktor Zhalsanov as a character known only as "the Mongolian."