David Kross and Kate Winslet co-star in director Stephen Daldry’s The Reader.

The Weinstein Co. Melinda Sue Gordon

They say you never forget your first love. That’s the theme of the romantic drama The Reader, which demonstrates that not only do you not forget your first love, but that that love is everlasting.

The Reader, based on the international bestseller by Bernhard Schlink, is a lovely but melancholy film. Although the plot depends on unlikely coincidence and a secret that you may guess long before screenwriter David Hare reveals it, one gets caught up in the doomed love between a young man and a woman twice his age. Set in postwar Germany, The Reader includes the familiar theme of the Holocaust, but with some new twists.

Director Stephen Daldry had previously collaborated with Hare on the lauded film The Hours, another complex story which spanned time and won the 2002 Academy Award for Nicole Kidman. Indeed, Kidman was set to star for them in The Reader, until her work on Australia ran overtime and she became pregnant, something that would not have worked in The Reader, with its many nude scenes. Kate Winslet has taken her place as Hanna Schmitz.

For its first third, The Reader is an ode to the joys and heartaches of first-time love. Although the film opens with the middle-aged Michael Berg (Ralph Fiennes) musing about the past and the deep feelings he has kept since he first fell in love, most of the film is told in flashback.

His story really begins in 1958 in postwar Germany when Michael (played as a young man by 18-year-old German actor David Kross) falls ill on a streetcar in his hometown and is rescued by a kind woman who cleans him up and takes him home.

Laid up in bed for three months, Michael later returns with flowers to thank the stranger for her kindness. Although he’s 15 and Hanna is twice his age, it’s not long before they feel a connection that is stronger than kindness. What follows is a long, buoyant look at the ups and downs (mostly ups) of their romance. Kross, a fresh-faced actor, is perfect in convin- cingly defining the naïve innocence and stars-in-his- eyes quality that a young man in the heat of his first romance feels. She gives him self confidence. “I never thought I was good at anything,” he tells her, at least until she shows him otherwise.

But Hanna is very secretive. She doesn’t even tell Michael her name until long into their relationship. Nevertheless, Michael brims with happiness over his coming-of-age love, taking her on a bicycle trip far from their town where a waitress mistakes Hanna for Michael’s mother. He finds it amusing, part of their little secret. Hanna’s favorite thing is when Michael reads to her — a hodgepodge of everything from The Odyssey to Huckleberry Finn to Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Hanna finds the latter scandalous, which is amusing given the circumstances.

But one day Hanna disappears without a trace. Michael is heartbroken.

Jump to eight years later. Michael, now a law student, is taken by his professor to a Nazi war crimes trial where he is startled to see that one of the defendants is Hanna. She is accused of being an SS officer who participated in the murder of 300 Jewish women who were being moved from one concentration camp to another in advance of the approaching Allied armies.

Michael becomes a keen observer at the trial, but keeps his distance. Trying to understand what happened during the war, he visits one of the now abandoned death camps. A fellow student asks his professor why, if everyone in Germany knew about the death camps, no one did anything, a question often posed in films about the war from Germany.

Although shocked and disillusioned by what he has heard at the trial, Michael nevertheless begins a correspondence of sorts with the now imprisoned Hanna, sending her his homemade cassette recordings of the books she had loved when he read them to her in what now seems like another life.

The Reader is a very wistful film, yet one without a great deal of sentiment. Although the film is about the lasting power of love, the grownup Michael has grown cold and aloof, even from his daughter. It’s only the unlocking of the memories from his past that eventually frees him, much as his tape-recorded readings free Hanna who, even in her most trying circumstances, maintains a cool, dispassionate sensibility.

Daldry has staged a compassionate moment between them that is touching, however. Later, there’s a prickly scene between Fiennes and the daughter of the death camp survivor who had testified at Hanna’s trial (both women played by Lena Olin). In a testy meeting at the woman’s New York apartment, he attempts to bring closure to Hanna’s story. But she is a formidable presence who refuses to budge on forgiving the past.

Winslet, nominated for both the Golden Globe and Screen Actors Guild best actress awards, makes Hanna a mysterious and seductive presence in her early scenes. Later, on trial, she is determinedly honest about the past … for the most part, a resoluteness that does not help her case. Later, however, she grows into a sympathetic figure that has been swept away by circumstance. At the center of her story is a lifelong secret, which you may guess long before Hare’s script finally gives it up.

What is supposed to be a shattering discovery about Hanna, something that that would have changed the course of the story, may leave some people disappointed. The big secret seems a bit flimsy and doesn’t hold up to reality. How, one wonders, has Hanna gotten so far in life and been able to accomplish so much without someone figuring out her secret?

Yet the fine acting and the startling touches to the story and the questions it poses outweigh trying to dissect The Reader, which hinges on the good will of the audience. If one is not too picky about things, then one can come away with an uplifting feeling about the power of love.

****The Reader

Starring: Kate Winslet, Ralph Fiennes, David Kross, Lena Olin, Bruno Ganz.

Rated: R, contains sex, nudity, adult themes.

mjanuson@projo.com