Luise

Director: Matthias Luthardt (Germany, France). Year of Release: 2023

1918, Alsace. Currently part of Germany, but near the French border. As a wounded soldier stumbles through a wood, a woman makes her way to a nearby cottage. Hélène has killed a German soldier who tried to rape her. She is French, but fortunately for her, Luise – the woman who lives in the cottage – speaks her language fluently. Alsace, the Todmorden of Mitteleuropa, is used to being taken over by its neighbouring countries, and its inhabitants are bilingual.

The cottage is wooden, and very austere, with crucifixes in every room. As Hélène is speaking to Luise, the wounded soldier bursts through the door, aiming his rifle at the Frenchwoman. He was a colleague of the man who Hélène killed, and is performing whatever the military equivalent of a citizen’s arrest is. Hermann speaks as little French as Hélène speaks German, so everything has to be communicated either by pointing or through Luise’s interpretation.

Another knock on the door – it’s a busy evening. A captain from the local army barracks, who speaks the local sing-song form of German, whose words you can more-or-less discern, but is far enough from the mother language to require subtitles. The captain seems not to have heard of the attempted rape. All he knows is that a man has gone missing, and has presumably deserted. Luise hides Hermann and introduces Hélène as her visiting Swiss cousin.

To sum up, both Hermann and Hélène are being pursued by the authorities, and leaving the cottage would mean putting themselves in danger. Hermann would like to return to his home, far away in Germany, but he is carrying a serious wound and barely able to walk. Hélène wants to escape to Holland “where women can live and love as they please”, or at least that’s what she’s heard, but walking through a war zone is not easy for a woman. She’s also drawn to stay with Luise.

And then there’s the little matter of Luise’s mother, who is still lying on the bed in which she died 3 days ago. Hélène helps Luise bury her mother and to carry on tending to the farm, while the still wounded Hermann stands around looking like a spare part. The two women are compelled to share a bed, causing a double shock for Luise – first the Frenchwoman sleeps naked, and second her back is covered with nasty bloody weals.

Luise feels a duty of care for both her guests, maybe because she has grown up in border country. When the captain demands that she behaves like a patriotic German, she replies, proudly, “I am an Alsatian”. Later, when asked why she is helping out both Hermann and Hélène, she explains that round here you help anyone in need, even if you don’t know them. An area torn apart by its imperial neighbours, Alsace is shown as a home of solidarity with the wretched of the Earth.

But Luise is not just formed by her birthplace. She is, presumably, lonely. Having lost both her parents, she is just starting to live on her own. But without Hélène’s adventurous nature, the idea of fleeing to Holland lies outside her ken. Which becomes an issue when an attraction develops between the two women, whose shared bed is not just used for sleeping. Hélène still wants to move somewhere with a reputation for being more emancipated, but can’t leave her new love.

Hermann spies the nocturnal adventures of Luise and Hélène, and becomes increasingly jealous. His background is just as conservative as Luise’s, but he does not have her potential to emancipate oneself. He, too, seems lonely, but more importantly, he needs to find a woman – any woman – so he can do his duty and produce the next generation. He does not share Luise’s mixed feelings about lesbianism which he sees as a sin which threatens the survival of humanity.

Luise, the film, is based on The Fox, a short story by DH Lawrence. Indeed a fox does appear to provide some metaphorical subplot. Although Luise catches it killing her chickens, she cannot bring herself to kill it. In the end, Hermann acts on her behalf, and asserts himself as the man of the house, by shooting the fox from an upstairs window. This gives him a rare chance to assert his authority, which is usually cowed in the face of the more emancipated Hélène.

The film contains other elements of Lawrence beyond the heavy-handed nature-based imagery. There’s a tad of eroticism, by which I mean that everyone is sleeping with everyone else. Luise’s Catholic conscience tells her to be ashamed of her attraction to Hélène, and she attempts to save her soul by providing Hermann with the progeny that he so clearly desires. Let’s just say that her enjoyment of sex with one of her partners pales in comparison to her experience with the other.

Notwithstanding all the bed hopping, nothing much happens for most of the time. But maybe that’s the point. At its strongest, Luise is a depiction of a moment in history when some women saw new opportunities. The absence of men, who were mainly at the front or already dead, enabled women to consider alternative ways of living. For some women, like Hélène, this meant full-on liberation. For others, like Luise, there was more ambiguity and moral hand wringing.

After all the dithering, something finally does happen. One one level it is not at all surprising, but it all takes place so suddenly, that you are jolted into a visceral response. Until now, the film has been riddled with the tension between three people who can no longer continue living the way they are, although their weakness and lack of power prevents any of them changing things. When the resolution that we need happens, it is almost anti-climactic. What are they going to do now?

Luise is not a compelling film. It’s nothing you need to see. At the same time, it engages you, and keeps you involved until the end. Not the film of the year, but definitely worth a watch while you’re waiting for something better to arrive..