★★★1/2 There’s a bit of Catch Me If You Can (and a lot of Spielberg, in general) in this story of a 21-year-old Jewish boy who survived during the Nazi regime in Berlin by not only forging documents to save other lives but to falsify his own person. The story is real and has several interesting edges: for example, what daily life was like under the Hitler dictatorship; what exactly is what we call “happiness” and where and how it appears, regardless of the circumstances; how a staging is built in order to live or survive. There is another element: the tone, although the film abounds more in dialogues than in actions, it has a certain lightness and attracts us, melodrama aside, the sympathy of the protagonists. Deep down, it’s about the carelessness of being young and having your whole life ahead of you, and how that youth also becomes a survival weapon.
