OxfordPress.com

Grade: B

Verdict: Passionate performances and a remarkable story overcome a so-so script.

Details: Starring Maria Schrader and Juliane Kohler. Directed by Max Farberbock. In German with subtitles. Not rated, but there is nudity, sex and violence. Two hours, 5 minutes. Review: “Aimee & Jaguar” is a courageous love story set against the bombed-out backdrop of Nazi Berlin.

It's also a true story.

It's 1943. Lilly (Juliane Kohler), a good German hausfrau, has four children and a husband on the Russian front. In his absence, Lilly fools around with high-ranking Nazi officers and swears she can “smell a Jew.” Meanwhile, a Jewish agent hides in plain sight, defying the so-called master race by working at a Nazi newspaper and secretly passing along documents to the underground.

Somehow, these two — against all odds and all common sense — fall passionately in love.

Oh, did I remember to mention the Jew's name is Felice (Maria Schrader)? That's right. “Aimee & Jaguar” is the adventures of two Berlin girls in love.

The title refers to their pet names for each other (used rarely in the film, but I guess it sounds better than “Lilly & Felice”). Felice runs around what's left of Berlin with a sophisticated circle of lesbian pals who are constantly one step ahead of the Gestapo. She spies Lilly at an opera and is smitten.

However, Lilly, who could be the poster girl for Keep Those Aryan Home Fires Burning, would seem to be the ultimate unattainable object of desire. She's never had a same-sex urge in her entire life. But once Felice makes her move, she responds. What ensues is an all-out romance, ardent and doomed. Think “Casablanca”-style melodrama with a Sapphic twist. In fact, that's what's surprising about the picture. Not that it's about lesbians, but that it has all the trappings of a conventional World War II melodrama. Director Max Farberbock treats his love story as just that — a love story. There are touches of “Cabaret”-like decadence, but for the most part, Farberbock concentrates on the unlikely alliance between Lilly and Felice, who can be seen cavorting in sunlit meadows like something out of a Leni Riefenstahl paean to the Third Reich in Love.

Luckily, his stars, who shared acting honors at the Berlin Film Festival, provide the nuances his script lacks. Schrader has a nervy edge and a danger-loving insouciance. Being at risk makes her feel sexy. She doesn't want “forever” (perhaps because she senses she doesn't have time); she wants “now.” Kohler matches her with a portrayal that slowly reveals a woman of depth beneath Lilly's fluttery, girlish surface. Hers is one of those deceptively “simple” performances that's actually built on one revealing layer after another.

With its nasty Nazis, doomed lovers and double lives, “Aimee & Jaguar” is an unexpectedly dashing movie. It's also a reminder that truth never ceases to be stranger than fiction.

— Eleanor Ringel Gillespie, Cox News Service