MOVIE REVIEW : Love Finds New Depth in ‘Martha and I’

Jiri Weiss’ beautiful, heart-rending “Martha and I,” a love story told with uncommon poignancy and meaning, stars Marianne Saegebrecht and Michel Piccoli as an unlikely couple whose mutual devotion develops limitless depths.

For Saegebrecht, the plump, radiant star of Percy Adlon’s comedies “Sugarbaby,” “Bagdad Cafe” and “Rosalie Goes Shopping,” the film is a personal triumph, signaling her emergence as a serious actress of remarkable range and understatement. For Piccoli, it marks yet another splendid performance of wit and passion.

At first, Saegebrecht’s Martha is strictly peripheral, the devoted, unobtrusive housekeeper to Piccoli’s Ernst, a successful, urbane obstetrician. But about a year after he’s kicked out his glamorous, adulterous, much-younger wife, he sizes up Martha and abruptly announces, much to her understandable astonishment, that they’re getting married.

What ensues is amusing and affectionate as Ernst transforms a servant into a prosperous doctor’s well-turned-out wife. The humble Martha resists mightily, unable to believe she can be--or even deserves to be--attractive.

Great love blossoms between them, but Martha and Ernst are the right couple in the wrong place, a charming town on the German-Czech border in the late ‘30s. For Ernst is a Jew, never mind that he’s a free-thinking agnostic who regards himself as a Czech through and through; Martha is from sturdy German peasant stock.

Ernst’s many sisters are silly snobs who condescend to Martha, but she has a brother who’s far worse: a rabid, nakedly anti-Semitic Nazi. As “Martha and I” grows darker, the actions of Martha and Ernst reveal the magnitude of true love.

Exquisitely nuanced and possessed not of a single false note, “Martha and I”--set largely in settings of deceptively solid, well-upholstered upper-middle-class comfort--proceeds with warmth, humor and a profound sense of loss.

Weiss, the veteran Czech-born writer-director, unflinchingly confronts with powerful calm and detachment the evil of the Holocaust on the most personal, intimate level. Every frame of his film is suffused with love and respect for Martha and Ernst, bespeaking Weiss’ assured, unfussy mastery of screen storytelling and the fact that he’s telling a true story; indeed, the film unfolds from the point of view of Weiss’ alter ego, Ernst’s teen-age nephew, played by Vaclav Chalupa and, as an adult, by Ondrzej Vetchy.

It took Weiss, long a Los Angeles-area resident, decades to get to make this film--and five years to get it distributed in the United States. “Martha and I” warrants every ounce of Weiss’ persistence and patience.

* Unrated. Times guidelines: The film has nudity, love-making and complex adult themes.

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‘Martha and I’ Marianne Saegebrecht: Martha Michel Piccoli: Ernst Vaclav Chalupa: Emil as teen-ager Ondrzej Vetchy: Emil as adult A Maurice Kanbar presentation of a Cinema Four release in association with Original Cinema of a production of Idunafilm (Kirch Group), Progefi and TFi Films Production in collaboration with ZDF, ORF, Canal Plkus and Raidue. Writer-director Jiri Weiss. Cinematographer Viktor Ruzicka. Supervising producers Sabine Tettenborn, Marius Schwartz. Editor Gisela Haller. Costumes Maria Frankova. Music Jiri Stivin. Art director Karel Vacek. In German, with English subtitles. Running time: 1 hour, 45 minutes.

* Exclusively at the NuWilshire, 1314 Wilshire Blvd., Santa Monica. (310) 394-8099.