Anne Frank, ma meilleure amie

Interesting to see a film based around the life of Anne Frank , but not solely all about her and for a change Anne is not portrayed as a complete angel.

However it's a film worth watching alone for the performance of Josephine Arendsen who was superb as Hannah Goslar.

Hanneli and Anne are best friends in Amsterdam, together with another small bunch of teenage girls. Unfortunately, they are Jews and are vilified on a daily basis by the Nazis. Still, they try to enjoy themselves, thinking about boys and trying to escape reality. If their daily life is not happy in 1942, worse is yet to come.

Apart from the lack of suspense, because everybody knows what happened to Anne and it's clear that Hanneli survived since she's telling the story, the big issue with this narrative is that you never really get to know Hanneli and Anne comes across as a big teaser and a silly teenage, obsessed with boys. Surely, Frank was not a saint and this should not be a hagiography, but the level of silliness and teasing is laid down too thick.

It doesn't help that the timeline shifts back and forward continuously, between the last happy days in Amsterdam and life in Bergen-Belsen and it helps even less watching the movie in the English version. Hanneli parents speak German to her and between then and she answers in English (Dutch in the original) so one may wonder what's going on in that family. There is no explanation about the fact that they were Germans escaping the persecution and Hanneli herself should have been speaking German.

More mess in the concentration camp, where a Hungarian woman's spoken part is not translated or subtitled, so you end up following a "dialogue" with Hanneli speaking English, someone answering in German, and someone else in Hungarian.

The movie has Anne Frank in the title, but it stars a different person. A friend of hers, who has her own journey and her own struggles ... and her own problems to survive. That being said, that should not deter you from watching this.

Nor the fact that it switches from good times to a harsh reality - which makes viewing this quite the hard task to say the least. Just when you see the girls/friends happy, you get taken away from that and shown concentration camps or other horrible things that (mainly) Jews had to endure back then.

Watching this - one can only hope that comparisons that are being made right now, are going to stop. I do not want to get too political, but when there is a pandemic, you should not compare yourself to people that were actually hunted and had to die for no reason at all - and not being able or having a choice in the matter.

But the movie was not made to be compared to nowadays. It was made to show how cruel or rather how horrible of a time it was back then ... and in that the movie succeeds.

Told from the perspective of Anne Frank's closest companion, Hannah Goslar (who is still alive at 93), this fictionalized movie jumps back and forth between their idyllic life in Amsterdam and what inevitably happened to them after the Nazis took them away. Of course, the latter scenes are necessarily harsh and provide the heartbreaking moments you fully expect from the outset. The problem is that Anne comes across as capricious in the pre-camp scenes while Hannah remains stoic and devoted. Director Ben Sombogaart's simplistic approach seems at odds with the touching story despite affecting performances from the two leads, Josephine Arendsen as Hannah and Aiko Beemsterboer, who bears a striking resemblance to the real Anne Frank.

This film tells an honest story about two best friends during the Second World War in the Netherlands. The film is told through the eyes of Hannah, Anne Frank's best friend. You see two teenagers who try to hold their own under sometimes difficult circumstances. It is a film that does not make us forget what happens when one group oppresses another. An absolute must see.