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The Diary of Anne Frank (2008)
One of the most
revered books in 20th century literature, The Diary of
Anne Frank is an inspirational yet devastating story. Anne manages
to communicate all the joys of youth – the inquisitiveness, the
impetuousness, the optimism and the inability to see outside your own
frame of reference – despite the atrocities occurring in the world
around her. A gifted writer, the tragedy of the story – and one of the
many of the Holocaust – is that a young girl with so much hope and
potential could be obliterated by the most insidious genocidal regime in
history. The great success of this 5-part BBC adaptation is that it
lives almost entirely within her world, making the inevitable conclusion
all the more powerful.
It’s 1942 and the
persecution and deportation of the Jews across mainland Europe is
escalating. Anne, 13, her elder sister Margot and her parents, Jews
living in Amsterdam, arrange to hide in a secret annex above her
father’s old place of business. The secret entrance is hidden behind a
large wooden bookcase. They are soon joined by the van Pels family,
husband, wife and 16-year old son, Peter, and later by family friend
Fritz Pfeffer.
Living in such
confined conditions, Anne describes her shifting and frequently strained
relationships with her co-inhabitants. Outspoken and confident, she gets
on well with her father (Iain Glen) but less so with her more restrained
but well-intentioned mother (Black Books and Green Wing’s
Tamsin Grieg). She treats Peter with contempt at first, not least
because he was able to bring his cat with him and she was not, but later
it evolves into something more romantic.
Over the five
half-hour episodes we get close to Anne, played by the extraordinary
Ellie Kendrick, who narrates the story through frequent voiceovers which
are, for once, necessary and justified. By keeping the production
minimal, and telling the story in a straightforward and honest manner
(it is not afraid to show the more
unsavoury
practicalities of living in hiding), the characters remain distinctly
human. The cast is uniformly fine and believable and each episode
remains remarkably contained and compelling despite, or perhaps because
of, the characters’ ultimate fate. Adapted by Deborah Moggach and
directed by Jon Jones, this mini series is a very worthy interpretation
that can sit alongside the plethora of already existing stage and screen
versions.
This single-disc
presentation, with good audio and visual quality, also contains a
documentary about the “Polish Anne Frank”, Rutka Laskier, whose diary
about her captivity in the Bedzin Ghetto was only recently released to
the public. |
