The German actress Nina Hoss has been playing muse to director Christian Petzold for the last few years. In both Petzold's creepy romance Yella and Jerichow, the director's spin on The Postman Always Rings Twice, Hoss has been the haunting central presence, but she has never pulled focus from her director's careful aesthetic. Her hushed intensity, beamed through those big, hypnotic eyes, adds a specific resonance to the director's works that may have just been artful exercises for other actresses.

In Max Färberböck's A Woman in Berlin, the new drama based on the controversial diary by an anonymous German woman during the waning days of World War II, Hoss again invigorates her environs but, unlike her work with Petzold, she outweighs much of the film's heavy themes and technical prowess. Playing a journalist and devout supporter of the SS -- her husband is a soldier -- the actress pronounces in the film's opening moments that her name isn't important before telling how she once reported from Moscow, France, and London in the early days of the Nazi stronghold.

But her status as anonymous also has a lot to do with stripping her of history. As the Russians invade and hold court in the section of Berlin where she lives, anonymous becomes indistinguishable from the other women, save her fluency in Russian. Along with dozens of other women, she is taken as a whore for the Bolsheviks until she decides that, in cases like this, having a seat of power and freedom to choose who has her are things she can afford above higher aspirations of dignity. In a masterful ploy, she seduces both a minor lieutenant (Roman Gribkov) and the brooding major (an excellent Yevgeni Sidikhin), becoming companion and escort to both even as the war ends.

It is the tone of emotional desolation that Färberböck seems to not fully grasp. The relationship between Hoss' anonymous and the major begins as a matching of intellects but becomes, near film's end, something like an old Hollywood romance. The psychology of both individuals gets muddied at the most crucial of moments and the horror and self-delusion of the situation is never conveyed as strongly as it is in the film's first half. Oddly enough, however, the emotional and moral complexities of the Russian occupancy are handled with an unsentimental clarity: For all the horrendous acts shown and not shown, no characters fall into simple labels of good or evil. Despite its lack of focus when it comes to the major and anonymous, A Woman potently evokes the meaninglessness of trying to find morals in war, and when this concept is aesthetically opaque, all of the unfathomable damage is painted by Hoss' subtle expressiveness.

Aka Anonyma - Eine Frau in Berlin.