SHOWTIMES: 7:15p - SAT 11/7 | 7:20 - SUN 11/8
Part of WENDEKINO Film Festival - with an introduction by Dr. Christine Haase, Germanic & Slavic Studies prior to Saturday's 7:15p show
WINNER: 2000 Berlin International Film Festival: Silver Berlin Bear: Best Actress: Bibiane Beglau
WINNER: 2000 Berlin International Film Festival: Silver Berlin Bear: Best Actress: Nadja Uhl
WINNER: 2000 Berlin International Film Festival: Blue Angel: Volker Schlöndorff
THE LEGEND OF RITA, directed by the gifted German Volker Schlondorff (THE TIN DRUMM), won two acting prizes and the award as best European film at the 2000 Berlin Film Festival. It stars Bibiana Beglau as Rita, a West German who belongs to a left-wing terrorist group in the 1970s. The group robs banks, kills people and inspires a dragnet after a jailbreak. The movie doesn't make it easy for us: Rita is not an innocent bystander and kills a policeman herself. But this isn't a simplistic parable about her guilt or motivation; it's about the collapse of belief during the last decade of the Cold War. Schlondorff believes his audience may be grown up enough to accept a story about a woman who is not a heroine. Imagine that.
The setup comes as Rita, who has been in Lebanon, attempts to enter East Germany with a revolver in her luggage. She is questioned by Hull (Martin Wuttke), an agent for Stasi, the East German secret police, and allowed to enter the country with the weapon but without her bullets. Later, because Hull (and Stasi, it is implied) sympathizes with her group's opposition to capitalism, she is offered a new identity.
Cutting her ties with her name, her past and everyone she knows, Rita becomes a cog of the working class. This is all right with her: She isn't a naive hobbyist but seriously believes in socialism. With a new name and identity, she goes to work in a textile factory and becomes friendly with a fellow worker named Tatjana (Nadja Uhl); their affection nudges toward a love affair, but when her identity is discovered, Hull yanks her into another life, this time running a summer camp for the children of factory workers. Here she falls in love with a man. But can she marry a man who doesn't know who she really is? The movie isn't about love, unrequited or not. It's about believing in a cause after the cause abandons you....THE LEGEND OF RITA doesn't adopt a simplistic political view. It's not propaganda for either side, but the story of how the division and reunification of Germany swept individual lives away indifferently in its tide.
rogerebert
