Christabel - 1988

Mid 80's?  I think...?  Uh, it's hard to tell on this one.  I guessed 1983, and what I didn't know then was this is actually a British miniseries edited together into a feature film.

Yeah dude.  So, I started this thing, and it has this black and white footage of a swastika, and I'm like, sure uh I guess I will watch a Nazi movie.  And this is a character driven story, a drama, a movie about a young woman named Christabel in World War II.

Christabel is played by Elizabeth Hurley, but I didn't recognize her at all.  She is a British middle-class woman living in Germany in the beginning of World War II, and her husband is the member of a anti-Hitler group.  In the beginning, we see them at a party where someone is imitating the Fuhrer, and they laugh along with him.

Soon enough however, as things escalate, laughing at Hitler seems the furthest things from their minds.  Once the war picks up and once England is heavily involved, it becomes not as safe to be a British person in Germany, and everyone who is not German becomes a possible enemy of the state.  Christabel and family do their best to get by, even resorting to at one point sending her back to England to live while her husband stays in Germany.

I stopped this movie the first night at 90 minutes, figuring it was almost over, but this is a 2.5 hour epic war film.  This movie goes and goes, and I'll pitch out a guess that it will likely be the longest movie on the set.  And yet, despite being so long, there was many incomplete feeling parts of the story, and parts where I wasn't sure what was happening or why.

However, it succeeds in many ways, and if you were to look at Christabel as a simple, human driven dramatic story, then it is actually great.  The actors are really good, the sense of doom and the atmosphere and the interactions are all real and they're pulled off extremely well.  The simplicity of the characters story is good, and there are parts where you're not sure what's going to happen.

But, despite all those good things, it lacks clarity about exactly what does happen, we're left to assume certain things a bit too often, and several key sequences are not in the film.  It's essentially like this was edited down, which would be really awful, cause it's still extremely long...  how fucking long do you need a movie to be to make sense?!  Come on, people.

I have no idea how to rate this or how to even think of it.  It's unexpected.  It's also certainly not all bad.  Also, for sure not GOOD.  It's about a 3.