Desperate Journey (2025)

With the Anschluß upon them, the Knoller family of Austrian Jews are facing the seizure of their property and their removal to internment camps. Desperate, they try to send their son Eric to an uncle in Florida whilst smuggling the other one, Freddie, to safety in the UK. Unfortunately for this latter lad (Lucas Lynggaard Tønnesen), the wheels come off his plans and he finds himself alone in the forest seeking shelter from the cold and from the pursuing Nazis. A stroke of luck sees him on a train, but only to a Paris already under occupation and just as ready to persecute it’s Jews. Again, fortune smiles upon him as he stumbles upon a nightclub where “Christos” (Fernando Guallar) sees his potential acting as a fluent German speaking host for their new, well heeled and womanising, occupiers. Freddie takes to this task like a duck to water and hopes he can quickly earn the 500 Francs new papers are going to cost, but events overtake him and he is soon in love with high class singer/hooker Jacqueline (Clara Rugaard) and also embroiled in the activities of the resistance. Unsure whom he can trust, he now wants two sets of papers and those are going to cost more than money. Now it doesn’t really help that the film is interspersed with scenes from the end of the war, and it is also a true story, so any sense of jeopardy throughout the main body of this drama is a bit limited. That said, though, Tønnesen delivers confidently as he flies by the seat of his pants into a den of bullies in uniform ingratiating and alienating himself as he goes. Both he and Rugaard inject quite a bit of humanity to a story that leaves much of it’s brutality to our imagination and to sparing performances from Til Schweiger and Jack Morris as suitably odious soldiers to whom the locals had no more status than the pigeons. Steven Berkoff makes a couple of cameos, but they don’t really make so much difference to a film that is well held by a young actor who presents us with a poignant characterisation of just what a man must do to survive without becoming a monster of his own making. The production design is classy, there are a couple of quite powerfully delivered on-stage ballads and on the whole, this is quite a decent story of escape, tenacity and consequences.