My Best Friend Anne Frank (2021)
Review of My Best Friend Anne Frank / Mijn beste vriendin Anne Frank (2021), directed by Ben Sombogaart
I did actually do a review of this at my writing job over at Movieweb, where you can find my review of this movie here. There’s this system I have where I do the original reviews over at Movieweb for certain movies, like this one I pitched to my editor, and then I release this review after some time has passed. I like reviewing them professionally for MW, then doing an informal review here because I can sit down and think about it more after some time has passed.
How I ended up watching this movie was interesting, as it was the weeks where Whoopi Goldberg had just made her provocative Holocaust statement on live television and Anne Frank’s betrayer had supposedly been figured out.
Now that one isn’t confirmed for sure, it is just speculation, but it helped me get ready in preparing to watch this movie. I watched this the day after it was originally released on Netflix, so the time was definitely right. Let’s dive into this review.
Anne Frank’s story is told through the eyes of her best friend Hannah Goslar.
Before I get into the specifics of this movie, I want to really point out that these are real people being depicted and that the overarching events of the movie were what they actually experienced.
I have no tolerance for denying the Holocaust happened, so please do not bring that to my website and page. My Best Friend Anne Frank was based on a book by an American author, Alison Leslie Gold, who wrote Memories of Anne Frank: Reflections of a Childhood Friend with the help of Hannah Goslar, who now lives in Israel.
This movie tends to cycle through two different time periods without any distinct explanation or marking as to why it transitions the way it does. The time periods are clearly marked, however, by the set design and the costuming.
The first series are when Hannah and Anne live in their homes at the Jewish Quarter as the Netherlands slowly falls deeper into Nazi control. The girls wear bright floral dresses and worry about their makeup and hair, or, in Anne’s case, the boy sitting next to her at the movie theatre.
Other scenes take place in the exchange camp where Hannah is all alone. Her mother dies in childbirth right before her family is seized by the Nazis, and her father dies in the camp due to illness.
Something key that the movie indirectly explains is that her family has papers for Palestine and passports to a Southern American country, so because of that, they were given privileges at the concentration camps other Jews would not have had.
They were not sent to the worst part of the camps because of this. The Nazi reasoning behind this was that these people could be eventually used as an exchange for prisoners of war.
But in these camp scenes, everything is dark and gritty in a stark contrast to the previous scenes. There, it seems like there is no sunshine or even light seeping through the windows. Everything is just damp and dark.
A good bulk of the story takes place when Hannah and Anne are together. I say this movie really did Anne Frank dirty because of how it portrays her; she actually is really mean to Hannah in this movie.
She ditches her for more popular girls and comes back only when she wants something from Hannah. She tells Hannah that she is going to bring her to Switzerland with her family when they flee, and clearly the Franks never went to Switzerland, but it doesn’t help the poor girl when she discovers the Franks have left without her.
Hannah also has very little character development outside of her relationship with Anne. She says she wants to be a nurse and see the world, which makes sense, but outside of that we don’t see much of her interests or who she really is.
Hannah is selfless, perhaps, because even when Anne ditched her at the beginning of the movie and didn’t include her in her new group, when she discovers Anne is on the other side of the camp wall, she throws food over for her.
I think this is an interesting movie to compare female friendship during the war era, and probably would have worked better without connecting the real-life figures to it.
The brutal intensity the Nazis tortured Jews really comes to light in some of the scenes, making it hard to watch, but we never see any particular brand of violence directly inflicted upon our main heroines. We know how this story will end due to Anne Frank’s fame, but the way her character is portrayed makes it slightly cringe-worthy because it was not flattering at all.
Overall Thoughts
It’s a movie I would say to watch once, but only once. I wouldn’t pay money to watch it unfortunately due to the fact that one of our main characters is intolerable and the other doesn’t have much of a personality.
Holocaust movies are important to have especially as the survivors of it are slowly dying out, but I’m not too sure about this one being about real people. It would’ve had more emotional impact if we disconnected from the Anne Frank story and made something completely new with a stronger script. But, alas, that’s just my wishful thinking at the end of the day.
