German debut director/screenwriter Max Farberbock displays an extraordinary eye for lush detail in capturing the atmosphere of 1943 war-torn Berlin that supplies the fertile ground for unlikely passion between Lilly (Aimee), a German housewife with four boys and Felice (Jaguar), a Jewish woman working for a Nazi newspaper and living by her wits to escape the Nazi’s encroaching hunt for Jews. Based on the similarly titled German best-selling account of Lilly Wust’s erotic, and inspired love life with Felice Schragenheim, before Felice’s imminent capture, Aimee & Jaguar takes on intimate and violent story-lines in revealing the challenges and victories of radical love during World War II from the belly of the beast. With a nod to director Luchino Visconti (The Damned, La Terra Trema) Farberbock achieves that rare film animal — a neo-realist film that mirrors reality better than any medium other than film ever could.

While bombs fell on Berlin, and the Gestapo broke down doors and shot suspected Jews on the streets, some citizens chose to live life to its fullest extent in spite of all immediate dangers. The cabaret days of ’30s Berlin were past, but remnants of that expressively sensual lifestyle were still surviving in the early ’40s — housewives and single women were consumed with making every moment count.

Actresses Juliane Kohler (Aimee) and Maria Schrader (Jaguar) carry Aimee & Jaguar with elegant and stimulating performances that are as genuine and subtle as any audience could expect. The dream of freedom between the two love-vexed women interrupts the harsh reality surrounding them long enough to establish their private liberation as a watermark of compassion where none else existed. When Felice finally discloses to Lilly that she is a Jew, Lilly’s daunted surprise melts into unequivocal tolerance and embrace that is more defiantly proud than anything she has done up to that moment.

Aimee & Jaguar shows love in an extremely physical context. Sex is both means and goal to two women who tremble with sexually high-pitched imaginations. Rarely are audiences given such bold examples of the micro to macrocosm nature of beauty, attraction, fear, politics, danger, and sexual esteem within a relationship of two people willing to sacrifice everything to be together. Everything about Aimee & Jaguar emphasizes a balanced existential duality within a theme of ‘satisfaction possessed.’ Felice names herself ‘Jaguar,’ and designates Lilly, ‘Aimee’ during one of their many sessions of lustful love making. At once primal and formal, the epithets announce liberation to an outside world that knows only physical punishment; never reward.

Casting is never more important in film than in a love story. By placing German actress Maria Schrader (Nobody Loves Me) into the complicated role of Felice, Aimee & Jaguar is bestowed with a performance so graceful, intimate, and unforced that the audience is compelled to fall in love with Schrader’s Felice as helplessly as her adroit co-star Juliane Kohler seems to have for the purposes portraying Lilly. Some audiences may wish to champion Aimee & Jaguar as a ‘lesbian’ film, but the power of the story lies in the fact that it is a ‘love’ story first. The brutal historical elements that surround the characters merely enable them to get to the point in their lives much faster. And that point is, "now, now, now, now."

Aimee & Jaguar is an adult foreign film that more than fulfills the space American audiences came to expect of superior foreign filmmaking in the ’50s and ’60s. While critics tug and tear at what is or isn’t coherent in Aimee & Jaguar, genuine passion is one indisputable element that reigns over the movie. Aimee & Jaguar slips easily into a class with movies like Jules & Jim (1961), or The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1988) with its sophisticated vision of kindred spirits swept up by romance that is punctured by harsh circumstance and conflicting social class. This is not a movie to miss while it’s on the big screen.

"We’re here! And we’re making movies!" "Power to the people who punish bad cinema!" Those self-important words, yelled by Cecil B. DeMented (Stephen Dorff - City of Industry) and his band of celibate renegade filmmakers, speak volumes of the "me thinks thou doth protest too much" nature of writer/director John Waters’ Cecil B. DeMented. Waters’ silly, uninspired effort at reinvigorating a ’60s revolutionary spirit to knock Hollywood plays like untrained lips on an old trumpet. Waters, the former maestro of high camp, is reduced to cinematic mush in a steep career decline after peaking with his enjoyable suburban satire, Serial Mom, seven years ago. Like a Farelly brother’s version of the Steve Martin flop Bowfinger, Cecil B. DeMented follows a group of grassroots film hacks, hoping to find spontaneous action, plot and humor in the film-in-a-film device. If the movie were cut down to 8 minutes from 88, it would be a more appropriate length.

A group of young guerrilla filmmakers in Baltimore kidnap Oscar-winning Hollywood idol Honey Whitlock (Melanie Griffith - Something Wild), forcing her to act as the star of their puerile original film. DeMented and his crew (The Sprocket Holes) drive around Baltimore interrupting legit film industry events and union shootings with their own cast and crew. The movie’s biggest flaw is that the faux action film the cult is shooting is more like something that couldn’t get flushed out of a drainage ditch.

Termed an action/comedy, Cecil B. DeMented opens promisingly with an amusing sequence in which Cecil’s terrorist film buffs wreak havoc on patrons of a stately Baltimore deco cinema house to kidnap an ego-inflated and very bitchy Honey Whitlock. The centerpiece of the movie comes shortly after Honey’s kidnapping when Cecil’s crew file past the camera, exposing tattoos of the names of their favorite directors. Almodovar, Spike Lee, Andy Warhol, Sam Peckinpah, and Sam Fuller are a smattering of the names indelibly written in the skin of the motley band of desperate film wannabes. But the editorial distraction of the scene warns of the disingenuous plot to follow. In underground soundstage cohabitation, Cecil’s cinema lackeys are whipped into a constant frenzy by being forced to eschew sexual release until their film is finished. Waters backhandedly makes the point that sex, like eating, is essential to maintain sanity and health. The idea is typical of the roundabout instructional satire Waters strains to emphasize throughout the story.

As Hollywood responds with snide remarks about her lacking personal character and talent, Honey begins to cooperate more freely with the DeMented and his gang. John Waters regular Patty Hearst (Cry Baby) appears in a small role as mother to one of DeMented’s misfits. Cecil B. DeMented finds Waters toying around with Hearst’s participation with her captors during her real life adversity when she was taken hostage by the Symbionese Liberation Army (S.L.A.) in the early ’70s. The whole film can be seen as a crash and burn view of the power of hot-blooded propaganda to get socially extreme results from a small group of people. For the lengths DeMented’s gang goes to in attacking the Hollywood studio system, their results are pathetically small and lame — much like that of the extinct S.L.A.

Cecil B. DeMented is a hodgepodge of propaganda and agitprop that Waters freely applies to capture frantic youthful energy from a cast of largely unknown actors. It’s a sloppy movie that is all junky style and no substance. The funniest scene comes from a different film-in-the-film when DeMented’s crew hide from the cops in a porn theater showing a flick staring Cecil’s ex-porn star girlfriend Cherish (Alicia Witt - Four Rooms). As Cherish lies on a bed eating cereal and writing in her diary, her pet hamster vanishes behind her. Oh where could the little hamster have gone? The same could be asked of John Waters.