The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum (Widescreen Subtitled)

Schlondorff (The Handmaid's Tale, Homo Faber, Swann in Love, etc.) directs his and Margarthe von Trotta's adaptation of Heinrich Boll's novel, and in the process shows us a treatise on how not to make a crime film.

Katharina Blum (The Tin Drum's Angela Winkler, perhaps the only good thing about the film) suddenly finds herself pursued by the police and tabloid journalists after being linked to a terrorist (Jurgen Prochnow, who has so little screen time he never really gets a chance to act). They think she's in league with him; she claims he was a one-night stand. The movie's tension turns on the basic question of which one of them is telling the correct tale, and how much harassment Katharina is going to take before snapping.

The wonder of Boll's novel is that it takes this premise (which should be familiar to readers of Kafka's The Trial) and turns it on his head; the novel opens with the climax, then takes us back to the preceding events to make us understand how she got there. The film ignores this opening, putting the climax at the end. In order to increase the mystery factor, I guess. Problem is it doesn't. All it does is confuse the picture, so we have little idea one way or the other what's going on through most of the film. (The film is also much clearer about the question of Katharina's innocence/guilt, which takes much of the fun out of it all.)

Winkler is a fine actress, and the one thing that might make this worth watching again; everything else about it is quite pedestrian. **