‘A Time to Love and a Time to Die’ or — Cross of Irony?

‘I do believe in happiness…’ Douglas Sirk once said, ‘happiness must be there, because it can be destroyed.’

Sirk’s films have always bristled with clashing ironic contrasts, yet in ‘A Time to Love and a Time to Die (1958) it’s taken to a whole other level: love/death, Spring/Winter, sound/silence, hot/cold, poverty/luxury. This approach carries great risks as it threatens to expose the artifice of cinema and shatter any illusion of “reality”, but Sirk’s extraordinary skill was knowing that the artificial was frequently the most effective way of grappling with truth and that overwhelming emotions demand overwhelming contrasts.

German soldier, Ernst Graeber (John Gavin), is fighting on the Russian front when his three-week furlough comes through. Desperate to visit his parents he returns to Berlin and it’s here the first blast of irony blows us off our feet.

“The same horse!” Graeber excitedly exclaims as he gazes through the window of the undamaged toy shop of his youth and at the brightly painted rocking horse still displayed within. “Hasn’t changed since I was 7 years old!” he beams with a smile before turning the corner and seeing the entire street where his family lives destroyed beyond recognition.

From here Graeber searches through what’s not just a city but an entire nation in ruins and a state of terminal collapse. Whilst doing so he encounters Elizabeth Kruse (Liselotte Pulver), whose father has been sent to a concentration camp. The two quickly fall in love and marry before his return to the front.

They might only have three weeks together but at least that’s something and, as Keenan Wynn’s cynical, gout-stricken infantryman cheerily informs Graeber — “Enjoy your life while you can. Have you any idea how long your life is? Three weeks! Three weeks of life. Then death holds the trumps.” The thing is, Wynn’s observation applies to us all because nobody knows how long their “furlough” from non-existence is.

This heavy emphasis on death shouldn’t come as a surprise considering Sirk lost his son during the war, and the inescapability of our mortality permeates every second. The “enemy” is never seen but, instead, functions as an inescapable invisible presence capable of annihilating at will. It’s telling that Elizabeth wants to spend their wedding night out in the ruins as opposed to the safety of the air-raid shelter because, ultimately, death cannot be hidden from, so why hide? Why pretend? The only escape is nihilism, delusion or drink and real love requires painful open-eyed honesty.

Although all this death inevitably results in flashes of stygian dark humour. Take Oscar, the Nazi art enthusiast, who, on greeting Graeber into his home, delights in boasting to the young solider of his wonderful art collection only for Sirk to then immediately cut to a wide shot of Oscar’s hallway revealing the countless severed animal heads hanging on his walls. We get both the joke and its underlying, and horrifying, message.

The scenes of destruction are as overpowering as Sirk’s artistic eye (is this film about the horrors of war or the beauty of immaculate production design?). The ruins are real but our attention is drawn to deliberately placed objects that continuously upset the horizontal. There’s chaotic visual excess but the overwhelming sensation is that of rigorous economy. Everything carries meaning, so when (or if) we notice that brightly painted rocking horse is now in flames we realise even childhood memories aren’t safe from obliteration.

Other Sirkian elements loom large: his use of fades and how two merging images can deepen understanding; sophisticated sound design in the way a swinging chain disrupts not only the strings of an abandoned piano but how that noise, shifting from the apparently non-diegetic to the “real”, violently disrupts the illusion of cinema (no wonder Godard loved this film). Miklós Rózsa provides an exceptional score. Russell Metty’s cinematography has never looked better.

‘A Time to Love and a Time to Die’ is about love and death, but the key word in the title might be “time”, and what we decide to do with what unknown quantity of it we possess.