Without its two lead performances, director Max Fäberböck's first film might just be another promising debut. But with them, particularly that of Juliane Köhler, the work becomes something far more memorable. Playing a housewife and unenthusiastic mother who indulges in meaningless affairs out of boredom, sexual frustration, and an almost girlish romantic streak while her husband fights for the Nazis on the front, Köhler makes clear the epic journey her character takes from thoughtless Nazi party-liner and male plaything to the lover of a female, Jewish resistance fighter (Maria Schrader). While Fäberböck displays a prodigious talent for staging individual scenes, he seems to have little notion of how to string them together, lending his film an often frustrating stop-start quality. But when it does get going, it proves deeply memorable, never more so than in the first love scene between the couple, which captures every bit of the awkwardness, fear, and overwhelming joy of the moment. The deeply felt work of Kohler and Schrader restores a sense of scale to the tragedy of their characters' times.