Reunion

Jerry Schatzberg’s movie adaptation of Reunion, released in 1989, moves its framing story up to the present day, and it was filmed, as the title coincidentally suggests, largely in a Germany on the cusp of reunification. Reunion’s central drama, the forging and dissolution of an adolescent friendship in the last days of the Weimar Republic, takes on a guileless, prelapsarian lyricism, while the final, abrupt twist of the narrative resolves a lifetime of trauma and fixes its meaning permanently in place.