THE READER  

KATE WINSLET won the best actress award in the recent Oscars for "The Reader". In the Golden Globes, she won best actress for "Revolutionary Road" and the best supporting actress award for "The Reader". We've seen both films and she really deserves to win more for "The Reader", where her role is definitely a lead and not a supporting one. Serious film lovers should be thankful that the film is now being released in local theaters. Before, other Oscar winning films like "The Queen" and "Monster's Ball" (where Helen Mirren and Halle Berry won their best actress Oscars) weren't shown here at all.

Directed by Stephen Daldry ("Billy Elliott", "The Hours"), "The Reader" is based on a novel by German writer Bernhard Schlink that Oprah Winfrey recommended in her show. It opens in 1995 with lawyer Michael Berg (Ralph Fiennes) making breakfast for a woman he slept with the previous night in his neatly kept apartment. He looks sad and lonely and we soon find out why through a series of flashbacks. It's 1958 in West Berlin and Michael is only 15 years old (David Kross). He gets sick on his way home from school and throws up on the cobblestones in an alley. A woman helps him and takes him to her room where she tells him to undress so she can clean him up.

Michael gets attracted to the spinsterish woman who lives by herself and returns to her. While she's dressing up, she catches him looking at her secretly and he gets embarrassed and flees. The next time he visits her, she asks him to get coal from the basement and he gets covered with soot. She gives him a bath and end up in bed. They have already made love before they even learn of each other's names. She is Hanna Schmitz and supplies no other information about herself.

He sees her working as a conductress on the train. Hanna loves it when he reads aloud his books to her, from Homer's Iliad to Checkov's "The Lady with a Little Dog" and DH Lawrence's "Lady Chatterley's Lover" that Hanna found scandalous. Michael is so enamoured with Hanna, but one day, she just leaves without saying goodbye and it takes a long time before he sees her again.

It's mid-1960 and Michael is now in law school when his professor (Bruno Ganz) takes him and his classmates to a public court where some women are under trial for Nazi war crimes. One of them is Hanna. It's revealed that she used be a Nazi prison guard accused of the death of 300 Jewish war prisoners who perished in a fire in a concentration come in Auschwitz. Michael is careful Hanna doesn't see him during the trial. It's then that he realizes that Hanna has a secret. She asked him then to read to her all the time because she is no read-no write. He could very well speak in her behalf to show that she's not fully guilty of the crimes charged against her, but he chooses to keep silent.

Hanna is imprisoned for life. Many years pass. In his own way, Michael tries to make amends and we won't tell you how as this is the part that truly moved us to tears, when we realized what he's doing to assuage his own feelings of guilt.. Eventually, they meet again when Michael visits her in prison and this is one of the most poignant scenes in the film.

The Reader" is a well made melodrama that touches on issues of moral complexity and ambiguity, of guilt and redemption. It's a Hollywood flick made for adult audiences, with its unabashed love scenes complete with full frontal nudity accented by attractive lighting of each provocative scene. We hope the MTRCB won't cut the sexy scenes as they're artfully executed with tasteful production values even if, admittedly, they somewhat border on sexploitation.

Echoes of the Holocaust will also haunt you, like that eerie scene where Michael visits a prison death camp with its rows and rows of old shoes left by the exterminated victims. Kate Winslet is mesmerizing as the lonely woman who obviously never realized the enormity of her crime.

Physically, her naked skin and limbs gleam in the dark with the help of the exquisite cinematography as she deflowers and teaches bedroom techniques to an infatuated teenage boy. She is shown aging here from her 30s to her 60s and she's just magnificent with the help of effective makeup.

David Kross as the young Michael gives an affecting portrayal of someone whose experience with Hanna makes him a conflicted young man and changes him for life while other women his age are falling all over him. It's actually also a male fantasy where an innocent teen is given private lessons in pleasure by an older woman.

Not much is required from Ralph Fiennes as the older Michael except look depressed most of the time.He apparently stands for the generation of Germans whose willful ignorance of what was happening to the Jews left lasting implications on the entire German psyche, but it's just too bad for him that the role of the younger Michael is just more colorfully interesting and has more meaningful scenes.