How would you prefer the film ended up?

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Well, I would have liked them to have a happy ending, but I guess that was impossible in their situation. There was too much guilt and pain and what not. Maybe it would have been nice if the nazi's would just have forgotten about them, so that they could go on with their lives. She might have even gotten back to her husband...nah, it wouldn't have worked....

It was the perfect ending: they finally dare to live out their desires yet evil wins, as usual.

Chaos reigns

I think she should have survived.

I think the film ends the only way it can, but there is a part of me that wishes Max and Lucia escaped their fate and lived out the rest of their lives in some strange sexual dreamworld of their own making.

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"It's better not to know so much about what things mean." David Lynch

I probably have to watch it again, but I guess I'm slightly disappointed this movie didn't make more of its brilliant premise. A lot of Lucia's side of the story is completely left to the imagination, which would have been a better choice if Lucia was just a victim. But Lucia is far from just a victim. She has a fellow prisoner "removed" (if she'd anticipated the decapitation is another matter, but it's clear from the story we're meant to believe she ordered the removal, which in the context of a concentration camp would mean almost certain death), she gets sexually excited by having Max step in broken glass, she consciously chooses to be with Max in the first place.

It's because of the complexity of her character, that I'd wish she'd be given more flesh and bones. She has very few lines that tell us anything of her thought processes. The only thing we really get is her actions and the reactions she gives to Hans coming to take her away, which are defiant and don't really reveal much of her inner workings.

Charlotte Rampling has amazing charisma, so she's able to convey a lot of emotion within the flimsy character she's been given. Had her character been more developed, she could have been the trigger for some final ending, in which they destroy each other through some desperate and twisted act of love and hate. Or they could have confronted the nazis together and walked away like some teutonic Bonnie and Clyde, leaving us guessing about their future.

As it is, I sort of lost interest as soon as the hunger-standoff began, which is a pity, because that would have been the time for their relation to either truly blossom or explode. Instead it's a sort of slow fade to the inevitable ending. Maybe the director/writer wanted to make it more artistic and mystifying this way, but it's actually less satisfying as a movie when absolutely nothing is resolved, and very little revealed.

To the credit of this movie, if it had to end with an execution by the nazis, this was probably the best way to do it. No big theatre ending, but an understated two shots, leaving two unimportant bodies lying by the side of the road. I thought that was sort of appropriate.

I figured it would be murder suicide....