A scene from “A Woman In Berlin”

Women in ruins

Add “My Life in Ruins” (Fox Searchlight) to director Donald Petrie’s list of painfully unfunny comedies, which already includes “The Favor,” “Welcome to Mooseport” and the unnecessary movie version of “My Favorite Martian.”

For her first film in five years, Nia Vardalos plays Greek-American Georgia. A former teacher turned temporary tour guide, Georgia knows her stuff, although she struggles to find balance between ancient and modern Greece. She’s saddled with Pangloss Tours’ more annoying tourists, including cliché ugly Americans Irv (Richard Dreyfuss), Gator (Jareb Duplaise), Marc (Brian Palermo), Kim (Rachel Dratch) and Big Al (Harland Williams), elderly British kleptomaniac Dorcas (Sheila Bernette) and a pair of unintelligible Aussies.

Her boss Maria assigns greasy tour guide Nico (Alistair McGowan) the better tourists, which naturally pits Georgia against him. She also sticks Georgia with hirsute tour bus driver Poupi (Alexis Georgoulis), who turns out to be quite hot under all the hair. But the budding romance between Georgia and Poupi is derailed by toilet humor (see bus driver’s name), flat jokes, relentless scenery nibbling and unapologetic homophobia. Ultimately it’s the sites and sounds of Greece that are the real stars here.

***

Directed by Max Färberböck (the lesbian-themed “Aimee & Jaguar”), “A Woman In Berlin” (Strand Releasing) asks a lot of the viewer. First it asks us to find compassion in our hearts for followers of the fuhrer in the last days of World War II. In spite of the horrors they endured following the Russian army’s siege of that city, pitying them could be a stretch for some viewers. The unflinching depiction of abuse heaped on the city’s women could be overwhelming for others.

Beginning in late April of 1945, a well-traveled journalist known only as Anonyma (Nina Hoss), kept a written account of the atrocities she and the other women in Berlin suffered at the hands of the Russian army, including multiple rapes and countless other indignities. Survival at all costs meant trading sex for necessities, transforming Berlin into “one big whorehouse.”

Often uncomfortable to watch, “A Woman In Berlin” brings a very personal and tragic story to a large audience. Whether that audience will be able to watch it is another question altogether.