My Best Friend Anne Frank

Movie review by Barbara Shulgasser-Parker, Common Sense Media
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Common Sense says

age 13+

Girl risks life to save best friend; violence, intense peril

NR 2022 103 minutes
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Kids say

age 14+

Based on 2 reviews

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A Lot or a Little?

The parents' guide to what's in this movie.

What Parents Need to Know

Parents need to know that My Best Friend Anne Frank is a Dutch drama based on the memories of Frank's friend Hannah Goslar, now 93. Goslar is also a Dutch Jew deported by the Nazis and their collaborators during World War II. Note that the girls later end up in side-by-side Nazi prison camps and Hannah risks her life to help save Anne. Language includes infrequent use of "s--t," "damn," "hell," "bitch," "slut," and "whore." Adults smoke cigarettes and get drunk. A pregnant woman is brutally mauled by a police officer. She later dies in childbirth offscreen. Nazis brutalize, beat, shoot, spit at, and otherwise menace and hurt Jews. Prisoners-of-war are deprived of food and decent living arrangements. A girl is seen carrying pails of human waste to a dumping site. Anti-Semitic graffiti is written on shop windows and walls of Jewish-owned shops, seen as the owners are being arrested. Anne is a curious young teenager who talks about "French kissing" and about a boy's "long tongue." Teen girls giggle about how babies get into their mothers' bellies and make fun of girls who still don't know the facts of life. In that taunting manner, Anne presses an unwilling friend to view illustrations of the mechanics of male-female sex and anatomical illustrations of male and female reproductive systems and organs. She pulls stuffing out of her bra and tries to feel her uncooperative friend's breasts. Those familiar with the events of World War II will be aware of the doom ahead for the story's Jewish characters, a foreboding that underlies every scene, although Nazi atrocities aren't the focus of the story. In Dutch, German and Hungarian with English subtitles.

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What's the Story?

The story of Anne Frank, a Jewish girl hidden from the Nazis in an Amsterdam attic between 1942 and 1944, is well known because her famed diary was smuggled out by her surviving father and published to acclaim. Plays, books, and movies have been written about her life, which ended at age 15 in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp from starvation and typhoid, shortly before the war's end. MY BEST FRIEND ANNE FRANK isn't her story, but that of her best friend, Hannah Goslar, who is now 93 and living in Israel. The pair were inseparable until Anne's interest in boys and sex led her to more mature friends who mocked and excluded the devastated Hannah. Anne is surprisingly unlikable here, a bit mischievous, but mostly self-absorbed, insensitive, and at times mean, while Hannah remains the loyal friend. Anyone who has seen a movie set in World War II knows that blood will be spilled, no matter how hopeful characters may seem. But the foreboding gives way to the overriding emphasis on Hannah's abiding love for Anne, despite feeling hurt and rejected by her. Told Anne has left for Switzerland (the story covering the Frank family's disappearance to a nearby Amsterdam attic), Hannah feels abandoned. Hannah eventually ends up in a prisoner-of-war camp and discovers that Anne is in a far crueler concentration camp next door, dying. Hannah risks her life, twice, stealing food and sneaking out of her barrack to get food to Anne.

Is It Any Good?

This movie tells an important story, but there's something off about My Best Friend Anne Frank. At the very least, the title is misleading. It's the story of the heroic Hannah, with Anne an oddly secondary, somewhat villainous character. She's the ungrateful friend compared to the saintly Hannah who risks her life to get food to her starving friend. The film takes liberties. Despite a scene in which Hannah digs through the separating wall to catch a glimpse of Anne, by her own account, Hannah never saw Anne. And camp scenes are confusing. Hannah is in a prison with privileges, which isn't really explained. Anne isn't as lucky.

Because so much of the film seems a miss-hit, it's impossible to tell if obvious underlying meanings are deliberate or unconscious. One can't be sure if the filmmakers even see the parallels of cruelties among young friends and the obvious echoes of adult cruelties played out during the war -- of one identity group against another, of racism, prejudice, and genocide. The petty and minor bad acts among young innocent girls line up exactly with the human flaws at the heart of Nazi bias, prejudice, exclusion, and brutality. The movie suggests, however unconsciously, that these are truths that people never seem to learn. Finally, Hannah Goslar has publicly stated that it's her life quest to keep telling the story of the Holocaust in order to prevent it from happening again. However flawed, the film serves at least that purpose.

Talk to Your Kids About ...

  • Families can talk about how it feels to be excluded by people who were once friends. Why do you think Anne treats Hannah badly?

  • Teenagers reach different levels of maturity at different times so Anne may have been ahead of Hannah in certain ways. Do you think Anne could have handled that difference in a kinder way? What could she have done differently?

  • How does the minor cruelty Anne displayed to Hannah parallel the cruelty that grownups showed each other during World War II? Do you think there's a connection between how we behave toward friends and family in our everyday lives and how we behave in the greater world when outside events pressure us? What does the movie say about human nature?

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