The film begins as a portrait of the queer nightclub Eldorado that flourished in 1920s Berlin before expanding to a wider portrait of Nazism and the erasure of history. It then goes to tell this important story through several smaller stories — each deserving of its own epic film. There’s tennis star Gottfried von Cramm and his dual love stories with queer woman Lisa von Dobeneck and gay Jewish man Manasse Herbst. There’s one of Hitler’s right hand men Ernst Rohm who believed his loyalty to Nazism would exempt him from queer persecution. There’s the still-living Walter Arlen recounting his romance with another Jewish boy named Lumpi. And, most thrilling to me, there’s the story of Charlotte Charlaque and Toni Ebel, two of the first women to attain gender reassignment surgery who also had a grand t4t romance with one another. These real-life characters are well-intertwined along with the broader history. And their stories are dramatized in beautiful recreations that capture the exuberance, sexuality, and love that would soon be taken away. While recreations are commonplace in documentaries, here they feel especially important. The documentary does a good job, not only displaying the rise of Nazism, but the embrace of the Nazis’ homophobia by those who were supposedly against their principles.
Eldorado is one of those documentaries that gives texture and context, faces and voices, to a well-chronicled period and set of circumstances. It does so with style, sensitivity, and a respect for the history it examines. The film recreates how the club would have felt, recreating the lights, sparkle, and 1920s jazz dancing of the club performers and dancers. The film also recreates the soft intimate moments of the first time lovers have met in the club, in soft hazy lighting and slow-motion glances. While the uglier moments, the moments that the Nazis gleefully documented, are still present here, the documentary only limits them to existing photos and newspaper clippings. The information provided is given the right amount of emotional weight. It’s clear that all of these people experienced more than just the utter despair and trauma that we’re so used to seeing in queer history docs. It is definitely an interesting piece of history in the LGBTQ space and the fact that Netflix brought this up as an original documentary will hopefully make it reach a wider audience. Personally, even though the stories were plenty and interesting, somehow the way they were mixed up with one another made me lose attention at a few places. I am not sure of there is another way to show this because as audience we all have our individual tastes. The parallels between this past and today are obvious if not dwelled upon in the film itself, but it is still important to tell these stories. Before we realize a lot of these will get lost into oblivion and its only through features/movies/documentaries li these that we will be able to keep a piece of our history alive. (5.5/10)
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