The miracle of Bern.
The Miracle of Bern (Das Wunder von Bern) is a film by Sönke Wortmann from 2003.
Of this dumbfounded, disenchanted Germany, displaced by the enormity of the events, yet not emptied, and indeed intimately so strong, so solid in soul to roll up the sleeves without feeling sorry for themselves or asking for mercy, to the point of rebuilding a virginity; of this Germany, I was saying, the film provides a meager, popular, effective fresco.
A neorealist fresco, one could say, because all this is told through the stories of simple people, of a family like many others, the Lubanski family, of a woman with three children who, with her husband who left for the war in Russia, ended up somehow. , she was forced to redesign her existence to keep her loved ones, and she did it with dignity and success, opening a small bar that gradually became an essential meeting place for many people of the town (Essen).
If German society and the events of the Lubanski family are effectively rendered by a screenplay and a direction of great realistic impact, also thanks to a narration through images that reconstructs the everyday life of the times in a suggestive way, with an obsessive attention to detail, from clothing to furnishings, the representation of the world of football and the German national team is also particularly successful.
Indeed, it can be said that this is one of the best football films made, on a par with the albeit different "Escape to Victory", also the one linked to the events of the Second World War. Football in the world of celluloid has never had great luck, apart from the example mentioned or, at the antipodes, comic films such as our “The coach in the ball”. Why? Perhaps because football is something that gives great emotions only when it is "true", while reconstructed "in vitro", acted, it transmits only coldness and predictability.