45/33
Lilac WinePerformed by Nina Simone
Tale
Nelly and Nadine is the unlikely love story between two women falling in love on Christmas Eve, 1944, in the Ravensbrück concentration camp. For many years their relationship was kept a secret..
She is quickly identified as Nadine Hwang and now director Magnus Gertten tries to piece together her story
At the very start of this documentary, we are shown a photograph of a woman staring into the camera. It's fairly unlikely she knew it was pointing at the group in which she was standing, but it was taken as the Ravensbrück concentration camp was being liberated by the Swiss Red Cross in 1945.
For that, he is fortunate
She kept a series of diaries and when it falls to her grand-daughter to finally read them – with quite a degree of emotion-laden trepidation – we discover that before the war she was in a loving relationship with Nelly Mousset Vos. With the aid of photographs and the sometimes quite harrowing narration from her text, we trace the lives of these two women both before and after the horrors of the Nazi invasion.
Not wishing, in any way, to trivialise this – but as a documentary it's all a bit lightweight
The story itself is one that's truly ghastly, empowering, emotional and sometimes quite shocking, but factually there is just way too much missing, and what we do have to go on and/or know is squeezed just once too often. It might actually have made for a better source as a drama, allowing some of the understandable gaps to be filled in, albeit speculatively, and leaving less scope for us to have to make our own guesses about their difficulties not just with the SS but with a society as yet unfamiliar with their candid and loving lesbianism.
It is worth watching, and the plentiful photographs and some archive footage add a little richness, but it doesn't quite deliver
Much of the heavy lifting comes from the soundtrack – it turns out Nelly was quite a good singer, too – but somehow it's really only the shell of a poignant story that falls disappointingly short.