Rose

Poland. Recommended, with a warning.
This is set in the aftermath of WWII in a really horrible place. A part of Poland whose inhabitants, the Masurians,  just to stay alive had to adjust their loyalties every 50 or 100 years or so from Poland to Prussia to Germany to Poland again then back to Germany under the Nazis, and then to the Soviet Empire. So, everyone hates everyone. The Nazis thought the Poles were defective, the Poles hated both the Germans and the Russians, The Russians were commie bastards. Pretty much everyone hated the Masurians at a time where there was no limit to the crap available to dish out to despised groups of people and in a place where the fighting had turned everyone feral.


It’s a love story between two people trying, against all odds, to get back to normal. It’s a very engaging story and the audience really roots for things to go well. Stories set in the immediate aftermath of a war always interest me. The norms have all been destroyed, people are choosing which to adopt and which to discard. There are possibilities that do not exist in normal times. There is also a bit of man-with-no-name style western in this movie. The main guy kind of shows up from no where and we get little by way of his backstory, and he is a definite good guy hero type.

It being a love story, complications ensue and some of these are pretty violent and creepy, hence the warning. The violence and creepiness took me pretty close to my personal threshold, which is not that high.