The star of this film and the highlight of the CD is the Dutch actress Carice Van Houten, who performs a handful of cabaret numbers with a panache and charm equal to many a celebrated figure of the genre. As a nightclub singer caught up in the Dutch Resistance during the Second World War, she delivers the saucy Ich bin die fesche Lola number in an appropriately skittish manner, and the warmth of her personality shines through in the other German songs and in A hundred years from today (sung in English for dramatic reasons), where again Van Houten can invite comparison with the likes of Dinah Washington and others who’ve recorded this Victor Young standard. It’s a moot point as to whether these songs might have been better placed as they’re heard throughout the film rather than in a group at he beginning of the CD. Many will recognise composer Anne Dudley’s individual touch in the re-scoring of Ja, das ist meine Melodie, whose 1920s sound world is reminiscent of her signature tune for Fry and Laurie’s Jeeves and Wooster television series. She brings a sure touch too to the Lisztian development of the picture’s languid main theme and its falling-third motif on track 1.

However, compared to the riveting story on screen, caught by your reviewer prior to reviewing the CD, the music plays asubliminal role, which no doubt was the director’s intention.

This CD acknowledges Dudley’s achievement in finding the right tone for the soundtrack in a thoughtful and elegiac piece of writing that binds together the often complex juxtaposition of good and evil manifest in the picture.