I’ve never read The Diary of Anne Frank. Somehow, it didn’t make my 8th grade reading list. Nor do I remember being required to read it in high school, although it’s entirely possible that I may have blown off reading Anne Frank to moon over some boy. So, like Catcher in the Rye and On the Road, it has remained one of those books I keep saying I’ll read but never do, probably because, at 46, it seems the time for me to have done so has long passed.
On one level, the BBC and Masterpiece’s Anne Frank is clearly intended for an audience much younger than I, a new generation of viewers who want a fresh approach to the story. Young audiences will certainly identify with this Anne Frank, played brilliantly by the radiant Ellie Kendrick. They’ll recognize in her their own youthful restlessness and anger, their own lust, their own ardent desire to shape an identity for themselves. And, given the series’ deliberate downplaying of historical specifics, they may see her story as representative of countless other young men and women—whether in the past, or right now, in Iraq or Afghanistan—whose lives have been brutally snuffed by war.
But the real marvel of this adaptation is how it allows viewers of all ages to find sources of identification. Even as it keeps its attention on Anne,
the series manages to stayed tuned to the feelings of the eight people who shared an attic with her for two years. In one riveting scene, a petulant Anne provokes a fight with Mrs. Frank, claiming that she and her sister will not make the “same stupid mistakes” made by her mother’s generation. “We’ll grow up and have careers, we’ll lead interesting lives,” she says. All the while, the camera remains on the mother’s painstricken face. And we know that her pain stems not from hurt feelings but from fear that the words of her daughter will never come true.
The film also devotes a surprising amount of time to Albert Dussel, the fussy, fifty-year-old dentist who shares a room with Anne. Having left his fiancée, Lotte, behind--a fiancée much younger than he--he appears to be so desperately in love that he can’t bear the separation. He writes letters to Lotte constantly, despite the group’s general agreement not to make any contact with the outside world. In one of several scenes, we see Dussel weeping inconsolably. And we’re left to wonder what the true source of his weeping may be. Is it love? loneliness? Or is it panic, a wholly reasonable fear that his beloved might grow tired of waiting and abandon him for another, younger man?
These scenes remind us that those two years in captivity contained other stories besides Anne’s. Like all good adaptations, then, Masterpiece's and the BBC's new version of The Diary of Anne Frank invites us to think beyond the borders of both its source material and its own interpretation of that material. And, it makes me want to read the book. Even now, especially now, at 46.
