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Ein Dorf wehrt sich: Das Geheimnis von Altaussee

In the last days of World War II, Gauleiter Eigruber ordered the blasting of the salt mine. Stolen art treasures are stored there. The villagers oppose it.

Brigitte Hobmeier in Secret in the Mountain (2019)

Only truly manages to deliver towards the end

Highly authentic compared with Clooney&#39;s The Monument Men. A good example of movies Hollywood-like in contrast to the European approach, incl. the language (or rather non-verbal communication). Chapeau!

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Secret in the Mountain

&quot;Ein Dorf wehrt sich: Das Geheimnis von Altaussee&quot; or just &quot;Ein Dorf wehrt sich&quot; is a co-production between Austria and Germany that premiered back in 2019 at several film festivals and this means it is not an old film by any means at this point, thus no surprise it was on television once more tonight. It is of course in the German language or maybe I should say in the Austrian language. Austrian German because the focus in terms all kinds of aspects here is definitely on Austria, not on Germany. It is set in Austria, the majority of the cast (including the key players) is Austrian and Gabriele Zerhau is Austrian as well. She had a break of almost five years in which she did not work on new films before she released this one. Or maybe she worked on this one for such a long time. Looking at most of the stuff Zerhau, who is in her mid60s now, made before during her really long career, I must say though I am not super surprised that this one turned out underwhelming eventually. But we will get to that later. Looking at the cast, German film buffs will recognize quite a few faces: Fritz Karl, Brigitte Hobmeier, Johannes Silberschneider and Oliver Masucci are just three of those with the latter playing a minor character for once. Another one would be Francis Fulton-Smith and it is still nice to see him once again go for slightly more daring projects here instead of doing these romantic dramas by ARD Degeto which he has been a part of many times too in the past. Sadly, he is really underused here, but I like him, so paid attention to him. Same applies to Masucci for me. Solid actor with great recognition value and he also would have deserved more screen time. He was one of the bad guys here and FFS played one of the good guys this time. By the way, speaking about the basics too, this film did not ran for under 90 minutes like most other German(-language) releases these days (and for decades almost), but ran for over 105 minutes, so not a short watch at all.<br/><br/>The story is briefly summarized in the title already. This is about an Austrian village that to some extent stood up against the Nazis in the final days/weeks/months of World War II. At least when it ended in Europe. The last word in the title is the name of said village. And the way they stood up here was linked to priceless paintings mostly. The German word would be &quot;Raubkunst&quot; and it means basically Nazi-looted art. Stuff that was stolen back then and here it is deposited inseide a mine and the Nazis want to blow it all up through a massive explosion, but the villagers do their best to make sure the art is safe. It&#39;s a long and heavy road with many challenges and people are killed in the process of trying to save these exhibits. Unfortunately, I must say that I felt that overall story here was a bit too thin for this running time. The consequence was that the dilm did drag quite a bit here and there and the smaller story lines were just not as convincing and sometimes they even felt like utterly pointless filler material even. With this I am for example making a reference to the love story between two younger characters that is mostly depicted in the earlier stages of the film. I mean it added nothing. The film did get better in the second half. It never feels as deep or memorable as I would have liked it to be, especially because I really like films set around that time, but there were still some decent moments like one of the good guys being killed in cold blood around the middle of the movie and his friends and family pay tribute to him in a slightly touching fashion. Near the end, the last 25 minutes maybe, it does get way better and it is pretty exciting and tense, admittedly alos because so much happens there. Be it our heroes being confronted by the armed Nazis on an open road where you could worry about all of them being killed or be it the partisans showing up to help them and basically save their lives. Also in this scene the young woman was interesting and how the Nazi officer recognized her again and he mistook her for a loyal German woman briefly before that. His face expression there was fairly hilarious. The actor reminded me a bit of Thomas Thieme.<br/><br/>Anyway, I see this film really scored a huge amount of awards recognition which does not surprise me too much because the subject is still one that awards bodies really like and here it is even more relevant because those people were somehow heroes and it is based on real events. Unfortunately, I do not believe the quality was really good enough to justify all this attention at the Romy Gala. Then again, it says stuff like &quot;Favorite Actor&quot; and not &quot;Best Actor&quot;, so at least this is more accurate. Nonetheless, Karl never should have won this trophy. He did not stand out or anything. He wasn&#39;t bad either, but this is fully an ensemble performance. At least, Karl is not that bad in movie compared to his significant other who in my opinion cannot act at all, but he also has been in several really bad films. This one here is not bad, but on the weak side too and many seem to forhget about that given the improved final sequences. For me personally, the weak is way more frequent than the good here, so I give the overall outcome a thumbs-down. The Altausee people from back then certainly would have deserved a more dignified tribute I&#39;d say, even if it&#39;s of course always difficult to come up with stuff like that after such a long time, 75 years here almost as the film is set in 1945. But yeah, obviously they have to fictionalize a lot here too, but I think this could have been done better and maybe this was where it become quite obvious that Zerhau is not the greatest writer. On a more positive note, to sum it all up, I agree with the other reviewer that the visual side was strong here, probably the best thing about the movie and this refers to cinematography, costumes and make-up as well. Everything basically. But this also means that the film is a bit on the style-over-substance side. I say that you should watch something else instead.

User reviews

Secret in the Mountain

Highly authentic, great cinematography.

Only truly manages to deliver towards the end

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