25/03/2025 - In his first period drama, Silvio Soldini focuses on the point of view of a group of women who, in the ruthless collective deception of nazism, suffer male violence and oppression

Obsessed with the idea of getting poisoned, Adolf Hitler had at his disposal an entire team chosen from young Aryan women to taste his food. No one knew this until December 2012, when 95-year-old Margot Woelk broke her silence and told an interviewer from the Berliner Zeitung that she had been one of these women. Starting from the 2018 bestseller by Rosella Postorino, a fictionalised telling of this historical episode, Silvio Soldini has directed the homonymous film The Tasters [+see also:
interview: Silvio Soldini
film profile], written by the filmmaker together with Doriana Leondeff, Lucio Ricca, Cristina Comencini, Giulia Calenda and Ilaria Macchia. The film opened the Bif&st in Bari, and will be in Italian cinemas from 27 March via Vision Distribution.

The Tasters begins with the arrival of Rosa (Elisa Schlott) at her in-laws’ in the East Prussia village of Gross-Partsch, the current Parcz, in Poland. It’s November 1943, the Soviet Red Army is advancing, the British air force has dropped the first bombs on Berlin. Rosa has escaped the capital for a more secure place, while her husband Gregor is on the Russian front. In the village, everyone knows that less than three kilometers away, in the thick forest surrounded by barbed wire, there’s the Wolfsschanze (the wolf's lair), the general quarters of Hitler’s Eastern front. Only a few days later, the SS take Rosa with six other young German women to Krausendorf (Kruszewiec today), where the cooks prepare the meal for the Wolf’s Lair. Rose “the Berliner” is at first regarded with suspicion but then accepted, thanks to a shared destiny with the other girls, terrorised by the task that has been ascribed to them. Over the course of the film, the character becomes friends in particular with the shy and detached Elfriede (Alma Hasun).

The recurrent image that stays most in the mind of the spectator is that of the seven women sitting around the laid table, controlled by the SS soldiers, and the cook (Boris Aljinović) presents the dishes and shares some details of the Führer’s preferences (“he goes crazy for chocolate”). Director of photography Renato Berta gives the images a brownish quality typical of the war classics of the 1970s. When news arrives that Gregor is lost in Ukraine, Rosa loses all interest in her own future and, as if to chase away the idea of death, she abandons herself to a secret relationship with the SS lieutenant Ziegler (Max Riemelt). Her realisation of the horrors of this war comes from the official, full of remorse for the brutality with which he has followed higher orders. Only a few sentences are used to reach an awareness that deserved more space and depth. As in The Zone of Interest [+see also:
film review
trailer
film profile], the centre of pure evil is very close but invisible, yet here the tension that should result from barbarism beyond the barbed wire never reaches a warning level and it erupts rather hastily and hesitantly, with the revelation of the presence of a Jewish fugitive in the group of women.

In his first period drama, shot in German, Soldini focuses above all on the point of view of women, respecting the novel and the screenplay that centres around the sisterhood of women who, within a great, ruthless totalitarian collective deception collapsing miserably, suffer for being involved in that merciless male hallucination, and a violence that in the end always sees them as victims, in all wars and across time. The film refers to the failed attack of July 1944, with Hitler's radio broadcast, unharmed, talking about the confirmation of the "task entrusted to me by providence". Doesn't this remind us of the words of a leader who was shot in the ear last July?

The Tasters is an Italian-Belgian-Swiss co-production by Lumière & Co. in association with Anteo, in co-production with Tarantula and Tellfilm, in collaboration with Vision Distribution, who also handles the film’s international sales, and Sky.

(Translated from Italian)