One does not typically expect to find oneself arguing with a film’s color palette for Nazis. Yet here we are. A new Italian film isn’t making just a palette mistake, however, it’s systematically reconstructing fascism as its exact opposite.
Silvio Soldini’s Le assaggiatrici (2025) is based on Rosella Postorino’s bestselling 2018 Italian novel by the same name about Hitler’s food tasters at the Wolfsschanze. In German it’s titled Die Vorkosterinnen.
It has arrived to generally favourable notices. The performances are creditable. The tension is effectively sustained. The director has stated, in interviews with Deutsche Welle and elsewhere, that he prioritises “emotional truth” over historical precision, which seems like a defensible artistic position, and one that accounts for certain liberties taken with the source material.
What it does not account for is the film’s extraordinary disinformation decision to wash the entire Nazi apparatus in petrol (teal).
Chromatic History of National Socialism
Adolf Hitler was many things. Indifferent to visual propaganda definitely was not among them.
His very particular selection of red, white, and black for the visual identity of a Nazi was not accidental. Hitler addressed the question directly in Mein Kampf, explaining that Imperial German red was deliberately chosen for psychological impact. He wanted its association with revolution, its capacity to command attention, its physiological effect on the blood and nerves. The Nuremberg rallies were intentionally seas of red. The swastika banner was designed, by Hitler’s own account, to be impossible to ignore.
This was, one must acknowledge, a propaganda achievement from the lessons of WWI (e.g. Woodrow Wilson’s belief in spectacle as a weapon, leading to Edward Bernay’s publication of a propaganda bible). The Nazis understood from the last war, if not many before them, that militant power and rapid disruption comes not merely through argument but through aesthetic experience. The red was aggressive, confident, seductive. It promised antithesis, rupture, transformation. It stirred.
Historians have documented this extensively, leaving zero doubt. The visual architecture of fascism was Albert Speer’s Cathedral of Light, Leni Riefenstahl’s geometric masses of uniformed bodies, and most of all the omnipresent crimson banners.
The threat of burgundy covering Europe was not incidental to National Socialism but constitutive of it.
The Fiction of a Teal Reich
In Soldini’s film, none of this exists.
The SS uniforms, which on set were presumably some variant of field grey, have been color-graded into a cold greenish blue. This is what Europeans might call petrol, or an American teal. The train carriages are teal. The Wolfsschanze shadows are teal. The very air of occupied Poland appears to have been filtered through Caribbean seawater.
Americans thinking of azure blue vacations of peace and tranquility will be shocked to find this movie painting SS officers in the wrong palette.
Meanwhile, the women who are the victims, unwilling food tasters conscripted into service under threat of death, are dressed almost uniformly in burgundy and brown.
Warm tones. The color family of the swastika banner is applied to the victims, as if to invoke and rehydrate the Hitler propaganda of young beautiful Aryan women in danger. Even the protagonist’s name is Rose!
The shallow symbolic intention seems transparent: teal is meant to convey cold machinery of death versus flushed cheeks of red as a warm human vulnerability. Petroleum versus blood. It is the sort of color theory one encounters in undergraduate film studies seminars, and it is executed competently enough.
The difficulty is that it ends up ironically being fascist propaganda because it is precisely backwards.
Hitler Was an Inversion Artist
Consider what the audience is being taught.
A viewer encountering this film, especially the younger viewer for whom the Second World War is ancient history, absorbs the following visual grammar: Fascism is cold. Fascism is teal and grey and clinical. Fascism looks like a hospital corridor, or a Baltic winter, or an industrial refrigeration unit.
False.
This is not what fascism looked like. It rose, in fact, as the exact opposite.
Fascism in Germany was always meant by Hitler to be red hot. It was his vision of Imperial red, white and black for stirring reactions and emotive attachment. It was torchlight and drums and the intoxication of abrupt mass belonging and sudden purpose. It was institutional drug and drink abuse to dispense rapid highs.
The Nazis did not present themselves as slow and precise, bureaucrats of byzantine rules. That was how they aspired to operate, but not how they recruited or actually functioned. They presented themselves as easy vitality, as rapid revolution, as blood and fire and national resurrection.
They were the cheap promise and marketing of Red Bull, Monster drink, 5 hour energy shot, not bowls of slow cooked hearty soup and vegetables with cream. “Fanta” was the Nazi division of Coca Cola, marketed like a Genozid Fantasie in a bottle.
The women, meanwhile, would not have dressed in coordinated burgundy. They were rural conscripts and Berlin refugees. They wore what they had. But even setting aside questions of costume accuracy, there is something perverse about rendering victims in the color palette of the perpetrator’s own propaganda. Notably the women also are portrayed as the smoking, drinking and promiscuous ones, while the Nazis are falsely described as teetotalers.
This reversal is painful to see, as Nazis are played in the film as completely inverted to what makes Nazism so dangerous.
“Emotional Truth” and Its Discontents
Director Soldini has explained that historical precision matters less to him than achieving an emotional resonance. One sympathises with the artistic impulse to generate ticket sales. The film is definitely not a documentary, and accuracy is a burden that can produce its own distortions that don’t translate well to audience growth.
But “emotional truth” is not a free pass to rehydrate Nazism. If your emotional symbolism teaches audiences to look for the wrong visual signatures, if it trains them to associate fascism with cold clinical teal rather than seductive aggressive red, then your emotional truth is propagating a functional falsehood that is dangerous.
This disinformation risk matters far more today than it might have in 1995 or 2005. We are presently surrounded by political movements that borrow freely from the fascist playbook whilst their critics struggle to name what they are seeing. A large part of that struggle is visual.
People have been taught, through decades of erroneously toxic films like this one, that fascism is ugly, grey uniforms and clinical efficiency and cold industrial murder. It was not.
They have not been taught that it looks like rallies of red hats and the intoxication of belonging to something larger than oneself.
They have not been taught to recognize the aesthetic of hot, rapid seduction and “day one” promises of disruption.
Hollywood Teal
One must also note that Soldini is operating within a system. The teal-and-orange color grade has become so pervasive in contemporary cinema that it functions as a kind of default reference.
He pulled the visual equivalent of scoring every emotional beat with swelling orchestra strings. Teal is what films lean on for tension, ignoring the fact that many people dream of holidays in a typical Caribbean blue scene like a Corona ad.
This creates a particular problem for historical cinema. When every thriller, every dystopia, every prestige drama reaches for the same cool teal palette to signal “this is danger,” the color loses its actual meaning.
It becomes mere convention.
And when that convention is misleadingly applied to the Third Reich, it overwrites the actual chromatic signature of the period with a contemporary aesthetic that signifies nothing more than “this film is a color-by-number for cinematic bad things.”
The Nazis were not teal.
But teal is the reduced palette of what serious films dip into, so the Nazis get rehydrated as such. And viewers start embracing Nazism again while thinking the cool, calm drab good guys are the enemy (as targeted by hot-headed attention seeking rage lords).
We Train Eyes to See the Train
One of the most annoying aspects of the film (SPOILER ALERT) is the director abruptly kills the Jew for trying to board the train of freedom. Of course in history the Nazi trains actually symbolize concentration camps, where anyone boarding faced almost certain death. Yet here’s a film that shows the inversion with trains as the freedom trail for the idealized Aryan woman working for Hitler, while the Jew was denied the ride.
The inspiration for the love story between Rosa and [SS leader] Ziegler stems from Woelk’s statement that an officer put her on a train to Berlin in 1944 to save her from the advancing Red Army, the armed forces of the Soviet Union. She later learned that all the other food tasters had been shot by Soviet soldiers.
That’s Nazi propaganda pulled forward, pure and unadulterated.
The love story in the film frames the SS leader as kind hearted savior, as he is shooting a Jew in the back so she couldn’t be liberated by approaching Allied soldiers, yet “saving” the Aryan girl by gifting her a rare spot on a Nazi train.
The film covers the protagonist’s hands in the blood of the Jewish woman murdered by her SS lover, blood she stares at on the train, perhaps to emphasize how the Swastika was believed to be a symbol of being lucky at birth. She lived to be 91 thanks to the SS, who made sure that a Jewish woman didn’t get a spot on that train, just a bullet in the back.
And just to be clear, Judenhilfe (hiding or even befriending a Jew) was a capital crime for years, eliminating all doubt by killing anyone who doubted. An Aryan woman caught running beside the Jewish woman she was helping and defending would not have been spared when a SS officer opened fire. In the worsening Nazism logic over time, and thus especially by 1945, it would be like a policeman shooting the passenger in a criminal getaway car and then offering the driver a can of gas.
There is a reason disinformation historians care about such visual culture. Political movements are recognised, and hidden, partly through their weaponization of aesthetics. The person who knows that fascism comes wrapped in red flags of instant vitality and promises of national greatness is better equipped to identify it than the person who has been taught to feel disgust for cool grey of law and order, to hate calm bureaucrats in clinical blue corridors.
Soldini’s film, whatever its other merits, trains eyes to see the exact wrong thing. The good guy palette in reality is flipped to evil, audiences are pushed to embrace the palette of Hitler’s violent hate.
- Chromatic inversion (blueish Nazis, reddish victims)
- Behavioral inversion (abstemious Nazis, hedonistic women)
- Logical inversion (Murderous SS as loving saviors)
Soldini color-corrects and codifies fascism into something unrecognisable, antithetical. In doing so, it makes the real thing far harder to recognize correctly today when it flashes itself all around us, signaling as it always has.
The Nazis wore red for a reason.
Red was how they poisoned power.
It would be useful if we remembered this.
