A new wave of German cinema reaching British shores over the last decade has begun to change the way we view the country’s emotional discourse. For films such as THE WOMAN WHO DARES, it seems Germany is just as interested in the kind of triumph-over-adversity stories we here in Britain pride ourselves over. For at its very core, the second feature from director Marc Rensing reminds us of the importance of balancing one’s burdens with our aspirations and dreams.

THE WOMAN WHO DARES follows the story of Beate (Steffi Kühnert). Once the fastest female swimmer in the GDR, Beate now painstakingly lives only to please others, whether it’s doing laundry for her son or babysitting her granddaughter. Scrubbing dishes and mopping up floors has become daily routine, and her selfless desire to help her family is as admirable as it is wasteful. So when tragedy strikes in the form of cervical cancer, Beate decides to use her diagnosis as an excuse to make up for lost time. She begins training for the Channel Swim, or what she aptly calls the “swimmer’s Mount Everest”.

In striving for this goal, Beate risks alienating the family that relies on her. Her son, Alex (Steve Windolf), and his pregnant wife decide to move out, while her daughter Rike (Christina Hecke) lambasts Beate for abandoning her role as babysitter during the peak of her graduate exams. However, it is the role of best friend Henni (Jenny Schily), where the emotional underbelly of this story rests. Schily, as Henni, provides the outstanding performance of this piece, expertly transitioning from a shallow cougar who picks up young men in bars, to the sisterly friend who experiences her own philosophical epiphany in order to help and comfort Beate, as she comes to terms with hers.

 “It is our dreams, not the obstacles, that define the way we live…”

THE WOMAN WHO DARES is far removed from the glamour associated with professional swimmers like Michael Phelps and Ryan Lochte, and succeeds in painting the sport as an exercise of elemental proportions. Gone are the gold medals and Speedo bodysuits. Instead we are left with only the healing power that perhaps only water – and specifically the ocean – brings. A great deal of the film focuses on Beate’s swimming, and while Kühnert fails to convince us in terms of her so-called ‘Olympian’ technique, she more than makes up for it when dramatizing her character’s exhaustion, both emotionally and physically. The alternative for Beate, as she freely admits, is “feeling like a floating coffin”.

However, the script begins to overload the viewer with this sort of imagery. Sooner or later the viewer tires of physical embodiments of Beate’s pain. The developments within her family are much more interesting. One wishes these relationships were rendered with as sharp a focus also. At times, it seems there are too many characters for Beate to deal with, but perhaps this is the point. Their dialogue flows back and forth like clockwork, blending with the aesthetically pleasing cinematography, showcasing a modern, and rather bold, form of German filmmaking.

THE WOMAN WHO DARES is a film about ‘landmark moments’, and how we react to them. While the script and its execution lack the sort of subtlety to catapult this film into the highest esteem, it is nonetheless a worthwhile watch for its uplifting moral and visual content, which covers a topic usually associated with a melancholia. The comedy is, perhaps at times, outweighed by the heavier moments. However this fits in well with the message Rensing intends to convey. After all, the film does not end by revealing the extent of Beate’s prognosis – instead a triumphant realisation that she has achieved her goal of swimming the Channel. It is our dreams, not the obstacles, that define the way we live our lives, right down to the very last stroke of front crawl we can muster.