Germany Year Zero (1948), Roberto Rossellini

 Documenting despair of a fatalistic post war situation, Rossellini's unmatched harrowing brutality of the human condition gives a daunting and sympathetic take on German citizens, unlike his other blunt features basing off on Italian exploitation.

While parting the conventionality of Rossellini's overtly political mechanism of working on historical and societal submissions of the comparatively weaker classes in other established features, 'Germany Year Zero' uses a personally unexplored authenticity of the Italian Neorealism, to counter it's political expressions with a diluted act of expressing the societal incongruity laced with Nazi ideologies and fanaticism, that directly or indirectly acts as a deciding factor of a character's fate and thus the inclination towards the examination of character psyche which in turn lays a strong sympathetic margin for the audience to connect.

Adding a much oblivious idiosyncrasy and profoundness to it's cinematic core, Rossellini draws the primitive foundation in human condition, that Bresson would put up in his identically correspondent piece, 'Mouchette' two decades from it's screening. 

While 'Mouchette' uses a definitive condition on juvenile exploitation with lacking empathy in his foundation, Rossellini's Neorealist piece on the other hand acts as much as a political commentary and war consequences as it upholds it's melodramatic sympathy towards Edmund (Edmund Moeschke), our mistreated central character of an eleven-year-old acrobat from a circus family.

Considering it's perception, Rossellini sentimentalizes an unhinged anomaly in treating the eventuality of the character of Edmund.

While gradually continuing to get on with the fact of criticizing the Nazi ideologies and abhorring any accustomed war filth and it's effects, Edmund's development of personal traits quite baffle you with the despairingly becoming of somewhat a follower of the Nazi principles which becomes a bit clear with his desire of killing his father and wandering off in the city with a toy gun wanting to dawn death upon himself. 

The act may again be a consequential effect of examining the human condition, forced upon despair and helplessness, but the sheer contradiction in the narrative's fundamental aspect gives rise to a disorientation.

'Germany Year Zero' is an unconventional and uncomfortably powerful film, working it's way on class dissidence and exploitation on the weaker Germany which is a subsequent effect of war, thereby proving it's Neorealism while simultaneously infusing elements of naivety, innocence, desperation and guilt.