by MATTHEW HAYS

The parched, sandy earth plays a crucial role in Caroline Link’s Oscar-winning feature film, Nowhere in Africa. The landscape poses as both a shock and a pleasure to the central characters, a young Jewish couple and their daughter who are forced out of Germany in ’38 as a means of escaping the Nazis.

A promising young lawyer (Merab Ninidze) senses the not-too-distant fate of Jews stuck in an increasingly-fascistic Germany, and thus endeavours to get his family passage to Africa, a place where they can run a farm and survive. Trouble is, wifey (Juliane Köhler) isn’t too wild about the wilds of Africa, stuck desperately missing her family and friends and the safe confines of her German bourgeois existence. Their daughter (played by Lea Kurka and later Karoline Eckertz) finds the surroundings much more to her liking. As filmmaker Link (and, clearly, the author of the source material, Stefanie Zweig) hint at, the young daughter is at a major advantage in terms of adjustment, seeing the changes in habit more as a massive adventure than a hardship.

There are laudable performances here, and Link has gone to extreme lengths present things as realistically as possible. Also of note is cinematographer Gernot Roll’s beautiful capturing of the landscape and the actors.

Occasionally, however, I got the sense the film was slipping into Driving Miss Daisy territory. While the wee one’s attachment to the African family cook was undoubtedly a fact-based accounting of author Zweig’s experiences, it intermittently veered into near-condescension.

The film is also a wee bit long. I would have cut a few scenes to get to the strong dramatic arc and climax that enmesh the couple. After she grows fond of Africa, the war ends. Hubby wants to return to Germany to help rebuild the country. She’s understandably horrified at the prospect of heading back into the heartland of the genocide. Though it takes too long to get here, this is the most intriguing conflict and dilemma Nowhere in Africa has going for it.

Nowhere in Africa opens Friday, May 23

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