During the German occupation of Norway in WWII, many Norwegian women ended up having children with German soldiers, be it willingly or by force. Set in the Norwegian countryside in 1990 after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the German feature Two Lives (Zwei Leben), directed by Georg Maas, tells the story of one of the so-called Lebensborn children, Katrine (Juliane Kohler), miraculously reunited with her mother, Åse (Liv Ulllmann) in Norway after fleeing Nazi Germany when she was a teenager. Now she has a family of her own and enjoys a satisfying life.
But when a young lawyer, Sven (Ken Duken), starts pressing the family to testify against the Norwegian state for reparations, Katrine firmly refuses to cooperate. She won’t tell anyone she’s afraid that the picture perfect world she has built her life around could collapse. After all, perhaps she is not who she says she is.
It’s easy to see that the storyline is appealing enough for both a thriller and a domestic drama, precisely the two genres helmer Georg Mass goes for. The bad news is that he doesn’t do it very well. For a thriller, Two Lives runs into two problems at once: at first, it’s involuntarily confusing as it provides too many bits and pieces in too fragmented a manner. And during the last two thirds of the story, it’s over-explanatory and redundant.
In both cases, the many flashbacks shot in grainy footage interrupt the flow of the story and are poor substitutes for a more creative way to provide the necessary information.
For a drama, it lacks insight and a complex approach to the characters, which are roughly sketched and have few scenes where their most profound aspects can surface. Katrine is the most developed character, which makes sense, but the truth is that it could have been richer — the same goes for the others. So more often than not, they are action figures.
Yet the huge problem is that the overall directing is so by-the-book, so unimaginative and mechanic that you never get to be engaged with either the conflict itself or with those in it. Based on a true story, Two Lives discloses little-known historical facts, but never in a gripping manner.
