In a flashback to 1966, Michael is at Heidelberg University Law School. Michael finds the empty apartment and is devastated.īack in 1995, we learn Michael is reserved around women, divorced, and estranged from his daughter. Hanna sends Michael away, packs her things and leaves. Toward the end of summer, Hanna learns that she is promoted to a job in the tram's head offices. On a bicycle trip, they visit a church with a choir singing and Hanna is emotional. She asks Michael to read to her from the books he is studying at school. Hanna seduces him, and they begin an affair lasting one summer. When he is well, he visits Hanna with flowers to thank her. A 36 year old tram conductor named Hanna Schmitz finds him, cleans him up and helps him return home. Pausing beside an apartment building, he vomits. In the flashback a 15-year-old Michael is feeling sick and gets off the tram to walk in the rain. In 1995 Berlin, from his apartment Michael Berg watches a train pass by, and remembers a tram ride from 1958. The film itself was nominated for several other major awards, including the Academy Award for Best Picture. Īlthough it received mixed reviews, Winslet and Kross, who plays the young Michael, received acclaim for their performances Winslet won a number of awards for her role, including the Academy Award for Best Actress. Some historians criticised the film for making Schmitz an object of the audience's sympathy and accused the filmmakers of Holocaust revisionism. Michael realizes that Hanna is keeping a personal secret she believes is worse than her Nazi past – a secret which, if revealed, could help her at the trial. She disappears only to resurface years later as one of the defendants in a war crimes trial stemming from her actions as a guard at a Nazi concentration camp. The film tells the story of Michael Berg, a German lawyer who, as a 15-year-old in 1958, has a sexual relationship with an older woman, Hanna Schmitz. Production began in Germany in September 2007, and the film opened in limited release on December 10, 2008. It was the last film for producers Anthony Minghella and Sydney Pollack, both of whom died prior to its release. It stars Kate Winslet, Ralph Fiennes, and David Kross. The Reader is a 2008 romantic drama film directed by Stephen Daldry and written by David Hare, based on the 1995 German novel of the same name by Bernhard Schlink.
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