My Best Friend Anne Frank Movie Review: A haunting and poignant account of Hannah Goslar’s friendship with Anne Frank

STORY: Based on real-life events, the film recounts the friendship, separation and a brief reunion between Anne Frank and Hannah Goslar during World War II, in Nazi occupied Amsterdam. REVIEW: “Look, that saucepan over there has seven stars. One of them is me. And the biggest one is Anna.” These words by Hannah (Josephine Arendsen), as she comforts her baby sister Gabi while showing her the Great Bear in the sky, perhaps sums up just how fondly she felt about her friend, Anne Frank (Aiko Beemsterboer). As the film explores the friendship between the two, against the backdrop of the horrors of the Holocaust, the narrative switches back and forth in time. Between Amsterdam in 1942, when fear is rife in the air as the signs of Nazi oppression lurk at almost every corner and the Bergen-Belsen Exchange Camp in 1945, where their inhuman brutality against the Jews is witnessed more vividly. Director Ben Sambogaart chooses to visualise the ’42 summer in Amsterdam in sweet shades of pastels, to highlight the innocence of adolescence and the growing up-years, as opposed to the stark black and grey tones in the camp in 1945. Based on the book, Memories of Anne Frank – Reflections of a Childhood friend by Alison Leslie Gold, it’s a summer that sees Anne and Hannah, friends from kindergarten, doing what teenage girls are wont to do – discussing French kissing, dates with boys, pretend drinking champagne, some disagreements and even stealing into movie theatres where Jews are categorically not allowed. Their interactions bring forth Anne’s vivacious and rebellious personality, who declares she wants to travel the whole wide world and become an actress or a writer when she grows up, “a famous one…” she adds. In many ways, ‘My Best Friend Anne Frank’ is a story of resilience and hope. Despite, the systemic persecution of the Jews, the girls are not afraid to dream. A particularly poignant scene is when Hannah sees one of her school friends and her family being packed off into a truck to be taken away to a camp, by the Nazi soldiers. A knock on the door could mean the soldiers have arrived to take them away to a concentration camp, with just five minutes to pack their belongings. The fear and frustration is apparent when Hannah's mother tells her father Hans, “We want to leave a country that does not want us, but they won’t let us.”However, Anne’s father believes he may be able to arrange for passports to take his family to Switzerland and offers to take Hannah along with them. Hannah overhears, and soon the two friends are making plans about what they will do once there. But one day Hannah finds Anne’s family suddenly gone and thinks they have left for Switzerland without her (unknown to Hannah, this is the period that Anne and her family spend two years of their life hiding in the annex. The same two years, during which she wrote her observations in her diary, which were later published by her father, who survived the Holocaust, as The Diary of Anne Frank). It is only in 1945, when Hannah, Gabi and Hans are at the Bergen-Belsen Exchange Camp, that she realizes that Anne and her sister Margot are at another part of the camp – the concentration camp. It is heartbreaking to see Hannah console her little sister, Gabi by creating illusions of a make-belief happier world, where they have bread, milk and lollipops to eat. In one particular scene, the sisters steal one bite each of an apple to curb their hunger. And later the same apple is shared with another prisoner at the camp. But when Hannah musters enough courage to go till wall of the concentration camp in search of Anne, she is not prepared for the even worse horrors there. She manages to converse with someone across the wall and asks about Anne, telling her, “She beautiful black hair.” The only reply she gets is, “You still have hair? We have nothing.” The meaning of which Hannah only realises later when she steals a glimpse of Anne. When Anne finally speaks to Hannah across the barricade, she pleads for food, having not eaten in days. In a heart-wrenching sequence, Hannah defies her father, and chooses to stay back on the night they are to be exchanged for one German prisoner of war and takes off to deliver a package of food for Anne. But the food is snatched from Anne by another prisoner. From the other side of the wall Hannah (and us) can only hear the screams, but it is enough to convey the desperation of the situation. And Anne begs Hannah for food again. It is this second time, that Hannah manages to make a crack in the barricade to see her friend for the last time. The two talk of traveling the world together in perhaps the most sorrowful scene in the film. “My Best Friend Anne Frank” is told through the eyes of Hannah Goslar, but it is Anne Frank’s character that we become more well versed with through the film. And that would be one of the film’s drawbacks as Hannah is always shown to be in Anne’s shadow. Although both Aiko Beemsterboer and Josephine Arendsen render memorable performances as Anne Frank and Hannah Goslar. The melancholic music (Merlijn Snitker) underlines the mood in both the 1942 and 1945 timelines. And ultimately, the film portrays the course of their friendship that withstands the horrors and trauma of the Holocaust with remarkable poignancy, making it an intense, emotional watch.