Based on a true story too extraordinary for fiction, Aimée & Jaguar opens with one of the bombing runs visited on Berlin by the Allies in the latter part of WWII, a nightly inferno that reduced the city to rubble and ash. But like their London counterparts in The End Of The Affair and Hope & Glory, these horrors take on more bittersweet associations, as the characters wind up feeling a certain nostalgia for a period when their secret happiness seemed wildly inappropriate. "Life is so beautiful, so wonderful," wrote Lilly Wust to her lover, Felice Schragenheim, in a note dated March 31, 1943, one of a series of love letters, poems, and other correspondence that formed the basis for Erica Fischer's German best-seller. In bringing their story to the screen, writer-director Max Färberböck doesn't add any special flourishes, but he does have the good sense to mount it handsomely, cast a pair of wonderful actresses in the lead roles, and stay out of the way. The title, Aimée & Jaguar, refers to the pen names Wust and Schragenheim gave each other after their unlikely and passionate affair. Played with whipcrack energy and style by Maria Schrader, Schragenheim was a Jewish lesbian and resistance member who pursued her clandestine lifestyle under the constant threat of capture by the Gestapo. Against her better judgment, she's drawn to Wust (Juliane Köhler), a married mother of four sons whose husband is a Nazi officer on the front lines. Under such dangerous circumstances, Wust's sexual realization becomes a powerful and blinding force, her love affair with Schragenheim transcendent enough to make the risks involved seem minor in comparison. While Färberböck's direction is often too workmanlike, with virtually nothing of interest on the periphery, he nails the film's centerpiece, a long consummation scene that could have been silly and overwrought but instead captures the innocence and joy of an adult coming out like nothing since John Sayles' Lianna. Though Aimée & Jaguar is haunted by an air of tragic inevitability, the overwhelming courage and ardor of its heroines makes a more lasting impression.