Souvenir

Based on David Hughes' novel The Pork Butcher, this is the tale of ageing German expatriate Kestner (Plummer), who heads for France to see daughter Tina (Hicks), rescues her from a loveless marriage, and whisks her off to the small town of Lascaud where, as a Nazi soldier in the Occupation, he had a torrid affair with a French girl. Befriended by a British journalist (Cazenove), they discover that Lascaud was the scene of a Nazi massacre in 1944, and that Kestner's erstwhile girlfriend was among the victims. The bulk of the film concentrates on questioning the extent of Kestner's guilt, interspersed with flashbacks of the young lovers romping in haylofts. Sadly, a potentially absorbing moral conundrum is rendered pedestrian by a banal script, and superficial performances from Hicks and Cazenove. Plummer is convincing, and the recreation of occupied Lascaud reasonably schmaltz-free, but complexities of character, ethics and politics are too often reduced to lowest-common-denominator thrillerama.