Do we really care what Hitler liked to eat? Well, here’s a film that does, so I can reveal an answer. Typical meals might have included chick pea salad with marinated courgette, pea soup with mint, or “cabbage fantasy” with cheese béchamel, followed by “his beloved apricot cake”. Of course, as every quiz expert knows, the Führer – along with having one testicle – became at some point a committed vegetarian.
We watch the above dishes being queasily consumed in The Tasters, a movie about women dragooned by the Nazis into sampling Hitler’s food to protect him from poison plots and paranoia. It took until 2012 for a 95-year-old woman to come forward and reveal the existence of this at the Wolf’s Lair compound in today’s Poland, where Hitler spent much of the war hunkered down and eating greens. Rosella Postorino imagined things further in a novel, on which this Italian-led, German-language movie is based.
Rosa (Elisa Schlott) has fled Berlin to stay with her rural in-laws while her husband serves in the German military. In this backwater which is also a kind of front line, Rosa is seized by soldiers to join six other women each day in the Wolf’s Lair tasting room where a chef dishes up the food for them to wolf. Then they sit trepidatiously for an hour to see if alles stays in Ordnung or if their insides implode. (Presumably, the rest of the food then needs to be reheated for its main patron – at which point, one supposes, a cook might pop the cyanide into a pea. The uneasy logic of all this made some people question the original story.)
The movie, directed by Silvio Soldini, has a tentative air throughout, much like the women who for various reasons are keen not to step out of line. They each get paid 200 marks a month, although as Rosa’s father-in-law notes apropos the German leader, “he loves animals and treats you like guinea pigs”.
Unlike the food, the film goes down rather too easily. Rosa has the odd stab at defiance, in between squabbling with her sister tasters (who see her as an annoying townie) and staring longingly at a photo of her husband. Schlott has the guarded smarts of a young Naomi Watts, which makes it all the more surprising when she suddenly starts sleeping with the stern German lieutenant in charge of the grub girls (a subtly controlled performance by Max Riemelt).
It’s one of several unearned or elliptical moments throughout the lulling narrative (another being a planned abortion for one of the women that seems to get forgotten about). As so often with adaptations, the multiple and circumspect angles of a novel don’t necessarily map well onto a movie’s need for a reliable “protagonist”.
There’s no guilty thrill of meeting the one-bollock guy, while the “20 July” plot – in which Hitler was nearly blown up at this very base – is another muffled off-stage event. Only as the war reaches its climax does Rosa take a significant stand, strong-arming her Nazi lover and helping a Jewish taster (Alma Hasun) who’s been passing as a non-Jew.
Perhaps the director was aiming for the artful understatement of 2023’s The Zone of Interest in trying to ironise the rigid shell of Nazi machinations. But there’s not the same deadly cinematic poise here. Amid hushed colours and voices, The Tasters has the metabolism of standard-issue TV, with few memorable master scenes to unlock insights into women, the war or the Holocaust.
Only in one exchange does Rosa’s troubled SS boyfriend deliver a tale that resonates. When very young, he says, he and his schoolmates were sadistically taught their letters and numbers by being made to read the inscriptions in the local cemetery – and told that the ghosts of the dead would jump out at them if they got the slightest thing wrong. It reminds us of the alarming culture of childhood in the Germany of the early 1900s seen in Michael Haneke’s The White Ribbon (2009). There was something psychically deeper than just the fallout of World War I that made the next generation unleash World War II.
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