‘Aimee & Jaguar’ Reinvigorates Story of Love

“Aimee & Jaguar” is about falling in love, the power of love, what it gives us and the price that can be attached to its joys. It’s the most familiar story in the lexicon of cinema, but watching it in this emotionally powerful film makes you feel like you’ve never quite seen it before.

As acted by Maria Schrader and Juliane Kohler, both of whom won Silver Bears at the Berlin Film Festival, “Aimee & Jaguar” shows individuals who are drawn to each other with such intensity we can actually feel the attraction ourselves. With key scenes so vivid they barely feel scripted, this is more than a same-sex success, it’s a most affecting, most sensual on-screen love affair, period.

Based on a true story that became a bestseller in Germany in 1994, “Aimee & Jaguar” details a completely unlikely wartime romance. Not unlikely because it involved two women, but because one of them was a conventional German wife, the mother of four children with a husband at the front, while the other was a Jewish woman hiding in Berlin from an increasingly rapacious Nazi search-and-destroy machinery.

The latter would be Felice Schragenheim (Schrader), who called herself Jaguar in the erotic love poetry she wrote as a hobby. Though she lived clandestinely in the apartment of her lover Ilse (Johanna Wokalek), describing Felice as hiding, while accurate enough, gives a completely misleading impression.

A daredevil with a highly developed sense of bravado, Felice thrived on recklessness and danger. So adept at passing as an Aryan that she worked at a Nazi newspaper, Felice hung out at the best Berlin hotels yet passed information to the underground. Believing in the value of “living your life now,” she was so innately duplicitous that, Ilse said, “as soon as you got hold of one Felice, another one betrayed you.”

Lilly Wust (Kohler), whom Felice dubbed Aimee, was a different sort of woman. A flighty but vulnerable and unsophisticated romantic, Lilly compensated for a philandering husband away at the front by having numerous affairs with men who were worthier in her imagination than they proved to be in life.

It’s through Ilse, who works as Lilly’s maid, that the two women meet, and though “Aimee & Jaguar” is bookended by scenes in the present, it mostly deals with the wartime years, from 1943 on, when the relationship began. It was a peculiar time for Berlin, when the city was both physically and psychologically unraveling due to constant Allied bombing. But “Aimee & Jaguar” is apparently a departure for German film in the way it uses that period simply as a dramatic backdrop.

Though the intensity of feeling the two women almost immediately experience unnerves them both, it’s the flirtatious Felice, who knows what’s going on but is terrified by the onset of real emotion, who’s affected first. For Lilly, who has never had a non-heterosexual thought, the emotional distance that has to be covered is if anything greater and more treacherous.

It’s through acknowledging and keeping faith with these considerable difficulties that “Aimee & Jaguar” does its best work. Because Felice and Lilly are always complex, always themselves, the barriers to their having a relationship are not easy to surmount. And things like the parallel jealousies of Felice’s distrustful friends and Lilly’s disbelieving husband only make things harder.

*

“Aimee & Jaguar” is the feature debut for German television director Max Farberbock (who also co-wrote the script with Rona Munro). His film feels uncomfortably middle of the road at first, but it gathers strength and integrity as it goes along, and its re-creation of how terrifying life must have been for these women ends up overpowering its more conventional tendencies.

The biggest factor in that success is the potent interplay of its two stars. Schrader and Kohler feed off each other beautifully, the intensity of their dynamic growing with every scene, and the sequence in which they confront Felice’s Judaism is as impressive as you hope it will be and more.

“Great people leave a mark, and when they leave, the mark remains.” So says a Nazi functionary, quoting Joseph Goebbels. In an irony the filmmakers no doubt intend, the romantic mark left by these two women turns out to be very great indeed.

* Unrated. Times guidelines: sensual scenes of lovemaking.

‘Aimee & Jaguar’

Maria Schrader: Felice Schragenheim

Juliane Kohler: Lilly Wust

Johanna Wokalek: Ilse

Heike Makatsch: Klarchen

Elisabeth Degen: Lotte

Detlev Buck: Gunther Wust

Released by Zeitgeist Films. Director Max Farberbock. Producers Gunter Rohrbach, Hanno Huth. Screenplay Max Farberbock and Rona Munro, based on the book by Erica Fischer. Cinematographer Toni Imi. Editor Barbara Hennings. Costumes Barbara Baum. Music Jans A.P. Kaczmarek. Set design Albrecht Konrad, Uli Hanisch. Running time: 2 hours, 5 minutes.

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