Film Description
Aka Das schreckliche Madchen. An account of how the inhabitants of a German village turn on a local girl when she begins to research life under the Nazis. The deeper she goes in to researching their resistance, the more she uncovers their collaboration. Bafta winner.
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By Barry Forshaw on 30th March 2005
When a German high school student enters a school essay writing contest concerning her own town's history during the Third Reich, her research produces alarming result... more >
When a German high school student enters a school essay writing contest concerning her own town's history during the Third Reich, her research produces alarming results: it appears that the town's close businessman and Catholic clergy rather than defying the Nazis colluded with them. As she looks deeper into the past, her actions become very unpopular. The acclaim that Verhoeven's remarkable film enjoyed was fully justified, and this director's cut DVD reaffirms its reputation. < less
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By Anon on 28th March 2000
Lena Stolze is Sonja, a popular high school student in the small Bavarian town of Pfilzing, who wins an essay contest and a trip to Paris, and then selects, as her nex... more >
Lena Stolze is Sonja, a popular high school student in the small Bavarian town of Pfilzing, who wins an essay contest and a trip to Paris, and then selects, as her next essay topic, "My Home Town in the Third Reich", under the assumption that she will find stories of heroic resistance to the Nazi regime. To her surprise, she finds the stalwart citizens of Pfilzing reluctant to talk about the Nazi era. Her curiousity piqued, she takes to the archives, but when she begins to uncover evidence of complicity, the city government passes new regulations-- to "protect the privacy"of certain citizens. She goes to court and wins but the city continues to delay and obfuscate. When she finally does get access and publishes a book about how the town cooperated with the Nazis, she is beat up by neo-Nazi youthsand sued by the editor of the city paper. In the end she wins, but in the moment of triumph, she realizes that the same spineless people who joined the Nazis 40 years ago haveseen the wind change direction and now support her.
Verhoeven pushes the story along with perky flourishes and odd sets--sometimes using back-projection, and even has the characters sitting in a "living-room" on a moving platform, driving through Pflizer as they listen to the hostile messages on the answering machine. The flippancy of these scenes, and the comedy in some of the confrontations between Sonja and various citizens, don't prepare you for a conclusion that attempts to draw some deeper truth out of the town's sudden embrace of the their young heroine, who has courageously exposed their own shady past. They want to erect a monument to her and she has some kind of epiphany and suddenly turns on them. Why? Because the same shameless weasels would be erecting a monument to Hitler if the wind were blowing the other way? That's a profound, deeply disturbing conclusion, but, coming as it does on the heels of a brisk narrative, and at the end of a film that begins with a rather nostalgiac but enjoyable look at Sonya's life as a teenager in the early 1960's, it seems lighter than air.
Based on a true story, that of Anja Rosmus of the town of Passau, who did indeed prove that the local newspaper editor who had claimed to be a resistance hero had once written pro-Nazi editorials, and whose husband did leave her at the height of tension. < less
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