The Affair (2019) Movie Review

『Indelible Traces of Love Sprouting Within a Transparent House』

🎥 Movie Overview

🎬 Title: The Affair (Skleněný pokoj, 2019)
🌍 Country: 🇨🇿 Czech Republic
🎞️ Genre: Drama / Romance / Historical
⏳ Runtime: 104 min
📢 Director: Julius Ševčík
🖋️ Screenwriter: Andrew Shaw
📖 Source: Simon Mawer, The Glass Room
📺 Platform: Netflix (availability varies by region)

👩‍💼 Cast: Hanna Alström – Liesel Landauer
Carice van Houten – Hana

🧩 In-Depth Story Exploration (Spoilers)

🌱 The First Cracks in Suppressed Emotions

Liesel and Hana appear as long-time friends who understand each other more than anyone else. Liesel, from a wealthy family, invites an architect to build a transparent house, a symbol of Modernism, beginning a new life with her husband. Yet, despite the house's transparency, it holds an inner structure where emotions are not easily revealed.

Hana does not hide her complex feelings for Liesel. She caresses Liesel’s pregnant belly and attempts a kiss, which is rejected. However, this scene illustrates not a one-sided desire but the blurred boundaries between the two women.

🔥 Faith Fracturing in the Gaps of Daily Life

As time passes and the children grow, Liesel’s world begins to show cracks. Discovering that her husband Viktor is having an affair with the nanny, Liesel experiences confusion between her ambiguous feelings for Hana and the reality surrounding her.

💬 Hana says, "You don’t belong with him. The house is yours, but he wants to own you." This line reveals both Hana’s emotions and the structure of female oppression in the era.

⚔️ War, Separation, and Nameless Waiting

With the outbreak of World War II, Liesel’s Jewish family must leave Czechoslovakia. Attempting to bring along the nanny Kati, they barely escape to Switzerland with Viktor, but lose their second daughter, leaving deep pain.

Liesel writes to Hana, recalling her unforgettable feelings and homeland, while Hana makes a dangerous alliance with a German officer to protect Liesel’s 'glass room.' She bears the officer’s child but names her son Oscar, after Liesel’s Jewish husband, signaling her complex emotions toward Liesel.

🏚️ Reunion on Ruins, Traces of Love in the Transparent Room

Years pass, the house falls into ruins, and Hana continues to maintain the space while writing letters to Liesel. Eventually, the letters reach Liesel, and the two elderly women reunite in the house.

Liesel expresses her wish to spend a night in the house rather than a hotel, and Hana quietly prepares their shared space. That night, Liesel rests her head on Hana’s lap, creating a moment where past Hana and present Liesel’s affections converge.

🦋 Emotional Resonance and Significance

🏛️ The Glass Room: A Stage of Idealism

The Affair adapts a novel inspired by the masterpiece Villa Tugendhat by Czech architect Mies van der Rohe. Beyond a romance between two women, the film explores architecture as a lens for 20th-century Czechoslovakia’s turbulent history and human experiences of forbidden desire and loss within it.

💖 Architecture as Another Protagonist: The 'Glass Room' Metaphor

The film’s most distinctive and powerful element is the 'house.' This Modernist structure commissioned by Liesel and her husband symbolizes their marital life and the transparency of the era. The glass walls and open layout embody the optimism and progressive ideals of the 1930s. Yet, this 'glass room' paradoxically exposes hidden desires and secrets. Viktor’s infidelity and Hana’s fervent feelings for Liesel become intensely confined and exposed within this transparent space.

After the family’s exile to escape Nazi persecution, the house witnesses Czech history’s loss and suffering through German occupiers and Communist officials. The desolation of losing loved ones and ideals is metaphorically represented as the house deteriorates and its function shifts.

💔 Forbidden Love: Longing and Separation Drama

The film portrays Liesel and Hana’s love being interrupted by Nazi invasion before they can acknowledge their feelings. Their love exists as longing unfulfilled for decades. Letters exchanged over decades serve as the lifeline and primary narrative device of this romance, demonstrating how the two women became each other’s emotional refuge amid historical hardships. Hana’s choice to remain in the house in Czech lands is particularly tragic. Her becoming a German officer’s mistress represents a painful sacrifice, showing how the ideal of the once-pure 'glass room' shattered under historical reality.

📖 Historical Context, Taboo, and Honest Restoration of Female Narrative

The film treats homosexuality not with excessive clichés or romanticization, but as suppressed reality and inner conflict. The story of Liesel and Hana explores the enduring power of love and longing even under the oppression of great historical forces. Hana is not merely a one-sided admirer but a figure who maintained her place despite lost love, serving as a symbol of resistance and an emotional memory left by the era.

🎯 Personal Rating

💕 Love Scene Intensity: ♥♥♥
⭐ Rating: ★★★★★