Theo Tells Candy the Truth, Explained：come over someone

What's really going on

The scene is a quiet monologue that answers the question the whole film has been circling: why does a German officer choose England? Theo does not make a political speech. He tells it as a sequence of small, concrete losses — money that lost its value, teachers caught shoplifting, sons lost to the party — and the summary is almost offhand: 'in Germany the gangsters finally succeeded in putting the honest citizens in jail.' His reason for staying was personal and old-fashioned: leaving would have meant 'letting down my country in its greatest need.' Only after his wife's death, and a chance return to the old nursing home, does the feeling reverse, and 'a great desire came over me to come back to my wife's country.' The film treats this as the plain truth, and the last line says so outright.

Theme

このチャプターで学べること

• Let down turns failure into a broken trust.
• Try your utmost raises effort to a formal promise.
• Would have loved holds a wish that never happened.
• Making the feeling the subject shows he is helpless before it.

発音のポイント

• poorer and poorer — Let the r in poorer run into and, then repeat the word.
• lost its — Blend lost and its into los-ts.
• sat still — Soften the t in sat before still, almost sa-still.