Review by Benjamin Poole
Directed by: Silvio Soldini
Starring: Elisa Schlott, Max Riemelt, Alma Hasun, Esther Gemsch, Jürgen Wink
In the poem 'Koniec i początek' by the great writer Wisława Szymborska, images of a post-war town are related in a domestic, almost mundane tone - "Someone needs to push the rubble/ to the side of the road/ so that the carts full of dead bodies/ can pass." A semantic field is presented which prioritises the fallout of war, the collateral damage, the effect upon people not directly involved with the conflict but inevitably devastated. War weighs heavy on the mind currently, for all of us. Cinema, historically a propaganda platform, often facilitates representations that are problematic, disingenuous in their weaponised glamour (cf. François Truffaut's "no such thing as an anti-war film"): a cursory Google of Top 10 war films reveals movies which invariably present conflict as action spectacle. Set in Szymborska's homeland of Poland (at the time East Prussia, now north Polska), Silvio Soldini's (co-writers Rosella Postorino and Doriana Leondeff) 1943 set The Tasters shares the unflinching, circumscribed eye of the poet as it depicts the story of ordinary women (the film is based on Postorino's book 'At the Wolf's Table', itself centred on the account of survivor Margot Wölk, although, even in this gruelling enough film, Soldini and co leave out most of that publication's horrors) impelled into serving as food tasters for Hitler in the paranoid, dying days of World War II.
In the press release, Soldini discusses the "matter of truth" and a "sense of artificiality, of fiction," and in relation to the questions surrounding Wölk's reminiscence (if you ask me, it's an odd story for a 95-year-old woman to suddenly make up), offers the bold statement, "if it wasn't [true], it doesn’t make much difference to me. The film and the book say something important about power, dictatorship, violence and their impact on women." In The Tasters, Soldini and his writers duly reconfigure events, change names and fictionalise to present a situated truth which honours the sacrifice and suffering of the civilian front.
We open in swathes of grey countryside, as if the territorial expansion of the Nazis has bled the life from the world (the sick antinomic of the phrase "lebensraum"). Rosa (Elisa Schlott), escaping from a bombed-out Berlin, relocates to her in-laws' small farm (her husband has been conscripted), a utilitarian domicile of wool blankets, hard chairs and pressing cold. "The men are at the front and we women need to do our part," Rosa is corrected by her mother-in-law, and soon enough she is commandeered by the SS and taken to the "Wolf's Lair" (fucking cringe of the Hun and their silly little names for things) where she will, alongside a group of other women, be coerced into tasting meals before they reach the mouth of Old Shicklgruber.
The first cruelty is the food: months of starvation makes the plentiful presentation of chef prepared meals head spinningly appealing, an instinctive reaction barely tempered by the possibility that the food may yet kill the tasters. "Can we stop existing even when we're alive?," a co-worker rhetorically questions even as she eats. The mise-en-scene is a torture porn throw back: the cold ceramic walls of Hostel, the fractured and cracked spaces of Saw invoking visual dread. Even though, for more of the film, there is minimal brutality, The Tasters maintains a febrile atmosphere of threat, a comedy of menace catalysed by the surreal image of the white-suited chef hovering at the table both to observe and seek professional validation. Intriguingly, Soldini keeps characterisation to a minimum. It is easy to imagine a cruder filmmaker imbuing each of the women with personality types, but predominantly the women are depicted within their capacity as workers. Rosa's inner life, and experiences, are emblematic of the group experience - we see her have an affair with a soldier, deal with the absence of her husband, and witness the daily negotiation of her continued existence.
Inevitably, the women are exploited in ways beyond tasting, using their bodies as currency for survival. The consequences of such interactions run the thin blade of life and death, and for some provides salvation and others the opposite: victims of a patriarchy insistently toxic in its execution. A testament to how people (and let's face it, this usually means women) are forced to adapt and endure in the face of lazy, encompassing terror. To paraphrase Szymborska, "Someone has to get mired/in scum and ashes... Things won't/ straighten themselves up, after all."
The Tasters is in UK/ROI cinemas from March 13th.
