User Reviews

"Das Lied in mir" (German title) is a pretty good movie. It features good actors in Jessica Schwarz and Rafael Ferro and a fitting (i.e reduced) cinematography to give the actors more room to develop their characters.

Let's have a look at the plot: German citizen Maria is quite astonished, when she recognizes a Spanish children's song. She does not know any other Spanish. When she loses her passport in Buenos Aires, she has to stay there, in order to wait for police and embassy to sort this out.

Her father joins her, apparently because he was so worried, about how his daughter sounded on the phone. But as we learn after he is dodging Maria's questions he is not her real father. She grew up in Buenos Aires was adopted and taken to Germany. And this is not the only lie that gets uncovered and keeps a good amount of suspense in this drama.

While Maria searches for some of her real relatives and Jessica Schwarz is acting well as the distressed daughter she gets help from a cop (Rafael Ferro) who had a German-speaking grandma and can act as her interpreter. At the same time, the man she came to know as her father tries not to lose her completely.

I liked the calm way the plot unfolds, while still having enough suspense and the succinct acting that I feel you get to see more in European productions these days. I think a lot of Hollywood movies are exaggerated and don't feel the least like real life, even if their stories pretend to be real life.

Go and check out for yourself

:The day I was not born. ........................ Maria, a competitive swimmer from Germany is on her way to Chile. At Buenos Aires airport, waiting for the connecting flight, she hears a mother singing to her daughter a Spanish nursery song. Maria starts weeping. The melody she hears awakes memory coming back deep inside her as the song in me. The German title of the movie. Much later she understands that her own mother sang it before her parents where caught by the dark times of the Argentinean military dictatorship. Told by her aunt Estella, the sister of her mother. All this when her passport and ticket is stolen and the police asks her to wait. She finds a hotel and phones her father, telling what has happened but that everything is fine, nothing to worry. But her worried father joins her. Worried not as father for a daughter in trouble but that the hidden truth about her past will emerge and the lies must be faced. Anton tells everything: her parents are not her parents and that her parents knew Anton and his wife. As foreign staff of a German business in Argentina he stole her as baby and could do it. More than 30 000 disappeared during the time of the Argentinean military dictatorship. When everything is said Maria contacts and visits her family. Alone. Without Anton. Estella, her mothers sister gives her a box with pictures of her as baby with her parents. She listens to a tape with the song she heard at the airport, her mothers voice. Maria is helped and supported by the police Alejandro, her translator. They start an affair with him. She asks if he does now the same as she: asking his father, a police, what he did then? But he is too much a coward, afraid to discover what his father did. He decides to live with unanswered questions of the dark past. Maria now knows the truth and what happened, asks Anton: "Why?" Anton: "We wanted you." Was it so simple? And Marias simple answer: "He is my father." Which he legally is not but the relation of all these years. Estella comes to the hotel and wants that justice must have its course. Now. Stealing a baby is a crime. Maria answers: "He is my father" and Estella: "I accept for your sake" and Anton goes free. Again. Is that enough? Seen against the background of what has happened? Estellas question is not asked then, yesterday, when everybody had its reason to be careful. The German second generation asked our parents what they had done during the brown years and after. The answer was a looking-away-answer. Why? They had nothing to fear. Only to loose respect in the seventies by them who asked, their children. Did not the same happen here: Anton and Maria loosing respect in the eyes of Estella and Marias family? Even then that the bondage with Anton was strong, build by all these years of togetherness: stronger than juridical law. The film ends that we see Maria walking the street of Buenos Aires, the camera following her. It seems to be an open end: the last word is not yet said. And can be said beyond the movie. Marias conscience vs Argentinian law.

I had the misfortune of having to watch this boring movie.

The story has been told a thousand times before: a young adult discovers she was adopted and goes on the search for her real parents.

Apart from the fact that this is no original idea for a movie any more (for 50 years I guess) this flick tops it by being extremely boring.

Any of the gazillions cheap Sunday afternoon cable flicks showing you the exact same "hunt-for-real-parents" schmooze is better than this epic fail.

Germans may make good cars, but they make lousy movies.

Don't waste your time.