My Best Friend Anne Frank
As Nazi soldiers strut around Amsterdam, Hannah Goslar plays with her plucky confidante Anne Frank in a soap operatic war film.
Those were the days: Josephine Arendsen and Aiko Beemsterboer
Even the title is somewhat belittling. Anne Frank is, of course, the author of the diary which she wrote while holed up in a hidden annex in her father’s house during the German occupation of the Netherlands between 1942 and 1944. The building remains a major tourist attraction in Amsterdam to this day, while her story has been filmed a surprising number of times, including three animated versions. So how best to find a new angle to dramatize this sordid chapter, and the subsequent horrors in the Bergen-Belsen Nazi concentration camp?
My Best Friend Anne Frank – adapted from the book Memories of Anne Frank: Reflections of a Childhood Friend by Alison Leslie Gold – begins with the legend ‘This is the story of Hannah Goslar’. As we are soon to learn, Hannah Goslar was Anne Frank’s best friend during the rose-tinted summer of 1942, when they swore their undying allegiance to each other, played ball and joked about French-kissing German boys. It’s hard to believe there was even a war on.
In jarring contrast to these sun-drenched sequences, the film cuts forward three years when Hannah and her little sister Gabi are incarcerated in Bergen-Belsen, with the colour scheme duly adjusted. They survive, barely, in an over-crowded hut where Hannah’s duties include emptying the human waste regularly accumulated in two buckets. The camp guards taunt the starving women by feeding sausages to their Alsatians in front of them, while Hannah fills her little sister’s imagination with imaginary stores overflowing with dairy and baked goods. Just as events could hardly get grimmer, the film jumps back to 1942 and another anecdote of female bonding is relayed in gushing, over-saturated hues.
Every new generation of Dutch filmgoers needs its Anne Frank fix and Ben Sombogaart’s (the first big-screen edition from the Netherlands, amazingly) is solidly told, well photographed and emotively scored by Merlijn Snitker. Holland’s Aiko Beemsterboer is a dead ringer for Anne Frank, while the doe-eyed Josephine Arendsen is an impossibly pretty Hannah Goslar, even when her features are smeared in all kinds of filth. Each new Holocaust drama is hard put to top the previous one for pure human degradation, but My Best Friend Anne Frank doesn’t try too hard and is relatively restrained in its depictions of the horror. It seems quite enough when, back in sunny Amsterdam, we learn that Jews are not allowed to use the telephone or to go to the cinema. More chilling is the optimism of Hannah’s father who states over dinner that, “I’m sure it will all work out” – because they have Palestine passports. Even if most of what happens on screen really did occur, it still feels contrived. But Sombogaart’s light touch is to be commended, even if his drama never really rings true.
JAMES CAMERON-WILSON
Cast: Aiko Beemsterboer, Josephine Arendsen, Roeland Fernhout, Lottie Hellingman, Björn Freiberg, Stefan de Walle, Tünde Szalontay, Adél Jordán.
Dir Ben Sombogaart, Pro Hans de Weers and Paul Ruven, Ex Pro Ate de Jong, Screenplay Marian Batavier and Paul Ruven, from the book Memories of Anne Frank: Reflections of a Childhood Friend by Alison Leslie Gold, Ph Jan Moeskops, Pro Des Barbara Westra, Ed Herman P. Koerts, Music Merlijn Snitker, Costumes Linda Bogers, Sound Peter Flamman and Wart Wamsteker.
Talent United Film & TV/Interstellar Pictures/ FATT Productions-Netflix.
103 mins. The Netherlands. 2021. UK Rel: 1 February 2022. Cert. 15.
