Recent viewings:

It Happened Here
The film opens with a short documentary section in which we learn about the Nazi invasion and occupation of Great Britain. It's very convincingly done in the style of a 1940s newsreel. The grainy black-and-white footage of troops and civilians might very well have been lifted from actual wartime footage, and the simplified animations of big white arrows moving across blocky grey maps will look familiar to anyone who has watched Victory At Sea or Frank Capra's classic Why We Fight.

Most of us who grew up in the past few decades have a practically subconscious, deeply ingrained memory of this style of presentation from schools or from televised documentaries that we have learned to intrinsically trust as authoritative and patriotic. The narrator's voice in such documentaries, invariably a fatherly baritone, is the comforting voice of truth. The voice we trust.

We also learn, from this documentary footage, about how the British population adapted to the Nazi occupation. How some collaborated with the occupiers, while others formed bands of partisans to resist them. And therein lies a tale.

We witness a partisan ambush. A group of civilians, caught in the middle of the ambush, flees into the night. Some of them are killed. One, a woman, escapes and makes her way to London. As a single woman cast adrift in a city under military occupation, she must find a way to make a living. Fortunately, as a trained nurse, she has marketable skills. But the only ones hiring are the Nazis and their British sympathisers, who make up the provisional government. What else is there to do but to take whatever job is available, and sign up for whatever additional training is required for that job?

Throughout the film, Brownlow drops in and out of different styles contemporary to the 1940s. The familiar Anglo-American newsreel style of the introductory section gives way to the high-contrast, gritty-looking black-and-white of period dramas. His ability to effortlessly drop into and out of the narrative viewpoint of a wartime propagandist is particularly unsettling. The decisions made by the protagonist, and the attitudes that she adopts, are all too easily understood. After all, how many times have each of us casually adopted some attitude or image, or performed some act of which we would ordinarily disapprove, because of job requirements or social pressure?

The ending is peculiarly understated and ambiguous. Unfortunately that's all I can say without giving away spoilers. But I very impressed and moved by the movie, nonetheless.