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Created Nov 26, 2013 11:31PM PST • Edited May 07, 2015 02:35AM PST

1. Quality

2. Summary

   Great 4.0

   Closed Season’s home-front Holocaust drama gets amplified by delving into some serious sexual intrigue. Result? A great movie, one that’s titled Ende der Schonzeit in its native Germany. Google translates that as “End of the grace period”. Hmm, besser in Deutsch.

   A near feudal German farmer and his wife need an heir. His husbandry equipment doesn’t work too good. So when a desperate Jewish guy crosses his path in woods where he’s poaching, the farmer takes him home and prevails on him to impregnate his wife. She’s horrified before becoming orgasmified. Oops.

   End of the Grace Period starts with the next generation reuniting in 1970s Israel before spending most of the movie flashed back to a solid German farm near the Swiss border, during the era when the Nazis jackbooted the land, the people and especially the Jews.

   The flashback’s the thing. Combining sexual intrigue with Nazi persecution in a home-front setting, it sits next to the French wartime romantic mystery A Secret in the pantheon of recent Holocaust masterpieces.

   Bravo.

4. Acting

   Great 4.0

   Brigitte Hobmeier delivers the movie’s essential performance as the farmer’s wife, delivering him his beer, bread and bed. After which she reluctantly accepts that their lodger engage in intercourse with her so they can produce an heir. Then she discovers that she likes sex … with the Jewish guy. What could go wrong? Not her performance, that’s for sure.

   Hans-Jochen Wagner plays her husband, who no doubt inherited the farm and now needs an heir to pass it along to, except he apparently can’t maintain an erection. He has other afflictions also, as Hitler’s insanity ravaged the German people even as it exterminated large chunks of the Jewish people. Wagner delivers a very affecting, albeit necessarily stolid performance.

   Christian Friedel delivers an extraordinary performance as the Jewish guy, playing him as a resilient young man during the Holocaust and then as a bitter middle-aged man 30 years later. Friedel was also memorable as the school teacher in The White Ribbon, that perfect movie about proto-Nazism in WWI Germany.

   Thomas Loibl plays the village Nazi to loathsome perfection. Boo. Hiss.

5. Male Stars Great 4.0

6. Female Stars Great 4.0

7. Female Costars Great 4.0

8. Male Costars Great 4.0

10. Film

    Great 4.0

    Note the German poster with the original title.

11. Direction Great 4.0

12. Play Great 4.0

13. Music Great 4.0

14. Visuals Great 4.0
15. Content

16. Edge

    Sordid 2.6

    Sex at 2.9 with Violence and Rudeness both around 2.5 gives the movie a tolerable Sordidness.

    The harshest thing about it is the mostly unseen dread of the Holocaust.

17. Sex Erotic 2.9

18. Violence Fierce 2.4

19. Rudeness Salty 2.5

21. Reality

    Glib 1.1

22. Circumstantial Glib 1.3

23. Biological Natural 1.0

24. Physical Natural 1.0