It is 1938 and the Austrian Anschluss is unfolding. In Vienna, the Jewish Knoller family must make some hard choices. While one brother is sent to stay in America, younger sibling Freddie (Lucas Lynggaard Tønnesen) must fend for himself as his parents opt to stay behind – a choice that is clearly not going to end well. While the film cuts back and forth between periods, we see Freddie on a death march with other Jewish prisoners in one timeframe, and trying to make his way to the UK via France in another.
In the westward-bound section, Freddie ends up in Paris, broke and desperate but eager for a bit of glamour all the same. An encounter with raffish but slippery Christos (Fernando Guallar), another immigrant, results in Freddie securing a job in the Opéra neighbourhood persuading Nazi soldiers with his perfect fluent German to come to a nightclub he and Christos work for. This is how he hopes to raise enough money to pay for forged papers. What follows tracks closely to dozens of similar stories about Jews in exile in Europe during the second world war, compelled to keep their identities secret, and while the film is in fact based on the story of a real-life Freddie Knoller, the cliched treatment rather drains it of the plausibility it needs to make it distinctive.
Clara Rugaard co-stars as vampy Jacqueline, Freddie’s love interest, a cabaret chanteuse who may be hiding secrets of her own. Elsewhere we get Til Schweiger as Officer Kurt, essentially the same menacing character Schweiger always plays (apart from his policeman in Muppets Most Wanted). In the lead, Tønnesen has a certain endearing openness of feature, although his facial resemblance to Elle Fanning is quite distracting.
The whole package is another bizarre zag in the chevron-shaped career of director Annabel Jankel, who started out directing The Max Headroom Show and the notorious 1993 version of Super Mario Bros. before re-emerging in 2019 after a long gestation with literary lesbian love story Tell It to the Bees.
• Desperate Journey is in UK cinemas from 28 November.
