Summer of '44

Forced myself to watch to the end of this film. Very disappointing indeed.

"The Swimming Pool Gang" (Die Freibadclique), starts in quite a promising way. Boys in a school class in the summer of 1944 are forcibly conscripted into the German war machine. They don't really know what to make of that and don't want to be there. It's common knowledge that the war is going badly for Germany, and they know that they will just end up as cannon fodder. So, there's tension there.

This movie looks quite good, with good costumes and cinematography, expressive faces and camera work. But it never gets out of first gear. We want to become invested in the characters and their journey - but the film doesn't let us because the story just isn't strong enough. The relationships don't work.

There is a lot of sexual innuendo here - far too much, for boys who, in fact, are only 16-17. There are bedroom scenes that really don't add anything at all.

The story meanders horribly, and before we have even realised it, the thing has changed entirely to something quite different. It's unfollowable.

The conclusion bears no resemblance to the beginning. We are left just wanting it all to end.

This is the frustration with Die Freibadclique. There is the propect of quite a good "rite of passage" film, that looks good and is filmed well. But it just goes off into nowhere, and at the end we wonder - "what was the point of that?"

The movie is a third sex(ual innuendo), a third violence and a third two boys jumping hand in hand from a diving board into a swimming pool.

There is some plot, but it fizzles out with no real development of characters or surroundings, people sometimes seem to change their personalities within a few minutes. The environment changes, but is incredibly irrelevant.

I do not really despise this movie, I am just as unimpressed as I could be.

Very underrated German movie on youth and war. It follows the story of young boys who do not want to take part in World War II and just want to grow up, have experiences, discover sex. Though, there is compulsory enlistment both to SS and to Nazi armed forces. It is very well filmed, acted, with excellent cinematography and art direction. Besides being a good film about boyhood, even with a "the graduate" moment, it is also interesting for thinking about Nazism in German society: it is very common either to imagine that just Nazi leaders were racist fascists and the whole population was manipulated and deceived, or that Nazism had a widespread support among each German that was neither Jew or Gypsy nor left-wing activist. Indeed, it was much more gray than black or white, with different levels os information or backing, besides the strong fake support derived from fear of being published for betrayal. As a matter of fact, the film is quite successful in exploring it. The end (personally, I think it is not as nice as previous parts of the movie, but it is still good anyway) of the film unveils the mysterious noir scenes that appeared in the beginning and several times throughout the film.