Nasty Girl

As Sonya comes of age, her native West Germany is the metaphoric heart of the Cold War. Apropos of this, she writes a
prize-winning essay on the history of Democracy in Europe and confirms her position among family and mentors of a very clever, but more importantly, very good girl - a classic conformist. The next year she enters another essay contest, this time on her hometown during the Third Reich. She discovers that her hometown, which claimed to be a lonely wartime bastion of anti-Nazism, worked with Hitler's regime. Though Sonya is unable to complete the essay, her curiosity is piqued, and leads to her chosen major of History and Thelogy that will culminate in the book/thesis that brings her town's sins to light. To the town fathers and other dangerous charachers, all this makes Sonya a nasty girl after all.

The film is very good. All sorts of devices - speaking to the camera, praying to trees, using trucks for the sets of rooms, even an inside joke on the controversy over the director's previous film (OK!), are utilized. I have heard "The Nasty Girl" compared to Brecht. It is absurdist hilarity tied to a great cause. Sonya is terrorized by those who disagree with her, but her ultimate moment of peril - and her only of self-doubt - is when her theories are finally accepted. Is she being co-opted? A fine parable for students who aspire to enter into the profession.

Verhoeven does an excellent job of depicting the panoptical regime Sonya is objectified to in the film. There are a number of scenes in the film in which they are filmed on the back of a moving, open-top truck dressed up to resemble a family sitting room. There are no walls which hint at Sonya's lack of protection for herself and her family. Everyone is able to see into her actions without her being able to see into theirs. It is only until she is able to get hold of the facts that are intentionally being withheld from her that she is able to regain control. This allows for the walls to reappear around Sonya and her family. The Nasty Girl is a wonderfully constructed (with heavy use of many cinematic visual techniques) film that follows the journey of a highly ambitious woman towards the truth behind her homeland's history. Ironically, there is nothing "nasty" about this film...well maybe the kiss Sonya and her schoolteacher share in the film, but that's another review...