Blind at Heart (2023)

Also called The Afternoon Woman or The Midday Woman (Die Mittagsfrau), this adaptation of the bestseller by Julia Franck tells the story of two Jewish sisters who come to live in Berlin during the Roaring 20s. Martha (Liliane Amuat) is a party girl while Helene (Mala Emde) wants to become a doctor, and the two escape the Bautzen province for the big city the first chance they get, leaving their mentally ill mother Selma (Eli Wasserscheid) behind, as they say she has “gone blind in the heart” - too distraught from losing her husband and sons in The Great War to recognize her own daughters. Helene gets a job at a pharmacy and meets Karl (Thomas Prenn), a writer. They fall in love but their happiness is cut short when the National Socialists (aka Nazis) seize power and Karl is shot. Martha flees Berlin but Helene decides to stay because she doesn’t want to give up her dream of studying medicine, so she reluctantly marries a conservative named Wilhelm (Max von der Groeben) who is in love with her and arranges for her to have false papers proving she’s of Aryan decent under her new name. As one might have guessed, her marriage to a growing Nazi sympathizer is not a great one, and she eventually leaves him and their son Peter after World War II ends. Mala goes nude in a trip of scenes with Thomas during the couple’s brief love affair, though the looks at her lady bubbles are anything but brief! You’d have to be blind not to be bowled over by Mala’s melons!