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Where Hands Touch
**
Dir: Amma Asante
Starring: Amandla Stenberg, George MacKay, Abbie Cornish and Christopher Eccleston
(12A, UK, 2hrs 2mins)
Going by director Amma Asante’s excellent previous films concerning interracial relationships and society, Belle and A United Kingdom, Where Hands Touch was eagerly awaited. It focuses on 16-year-old bi-racial Leyna’s experience during WW2. She’s the product of a love affair between a white German woman and a Senegalese soldier stationed in the French-occupied Rhineland after the First World War.These offspring were called ‘Rhineland Bastards’ and were ostracised during Hitler’s Germany, a little-known subject. Up to 25,000 black Germans had to deal with everyday harassment and due to the enforcement of the Nuremberg race laws they had to undergo compulsory sterilisation.
Leyna (Amandla Stenberg) is a target, so her well-meaning mother Kerstin (Abbie Cornish) takes her and Leyna’s Aryan younger half-brother to big-city Berlin where she hopes it will be easier for them to blend in. If Asante had focused on this family and others in their predicament with a larger minority cast, Where Hands Touch would perhaps have been a more believable and better film. Instead, she’s written and directed a Romeo and Juliet story which will appeal to the Young Adult market, where Leyna meets gung-ho Hitler Youth Lutz (George MacKay), falls in love and ends up in a labour camp. It’s not that Nazi’s didn’t have to copulate with those not considered part of the ‘master race’, Jews, black people, Roma. The ‘Joy Divisions’ in the concentration camps attest to that. But this is a well-meaning mess.
How does one count the ways in which these ‘huh?’ moments happen? From the first scene, Gestapo are searching for Leyna; she’s under the floor boards. Even though her mum gives a big fat hint by looking at the rug (one of the first things that would have been swept aside) none of the men notice it. Kerstin manages to get forged papers saying her daughter’s been sterilised, and you think Leyna would be smart and not want to risk that piece of good luck by having sex, with a Nazi no less, and getting pregnant. Wrong again. She proudly wears a signet ring Lutz has given her – the same his jazz-loving (!) high-ranking SS officer father (Christopher Eccleston) – has on a chain around her neck where everyone can see it. Her eyes are stubbornly shut, and she naïvely clings to an idealised version of the Fatherland as she comes of age.
Berlin is pretty and clean. The Treptow location they were supposed to be living in would have incurred major bombing by 1944 with huge swaths wiped out. While realistic, that would have meant additional CGI, making the film look even more like a set. The camp assembled on the Isle of Man is convincing enough but the narrative gets more incredulous.
At one point, Lutz, conveniently sent there to help his dad run things, stares at a filthy, freezing, with-child Leyna and says “You look changed.” Understatement? There’s also a couple of oh merde! moments that would have surely earned the girl a bullet, but she’s spared. Asante doesn’t flinch showing Nazi-inflicted brutality and indignities suffered, but even the last 15 minutes or so beggars belief. The acting, although good in turns, can’t make up for the disappointing writing in Where Hands Touch.
words Rhonda Lee Reali
Where Hands Touch is out now in selected cinemas