Rosa Luxemburg

This debate continued more or less up until the defining moment for European socialism, the outbreak of World War I, and it is this context that ROSA LUXEMBURG dramatizes. The right-wing of the party, which believed in legal means, like their counterparts across Europe sided with their national governments and voted in favor of war. These right wing socialists were also entrusted with leading the German state after the Armistice. They are the ancestors of the modern Social Democratic party now leading Germany.

Left-wing social democrats, like Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, opposed the war and were imprisoned for their beliefs. At the end of the war, Luxemburg and Liebknecht jointly opposed the new Republic with the left-wing Sparticist group, which evolved into the German Communist party. Although highly critical of the right-wing social democratic government, Luxemburg, (who incidentally was Polish), was equally wary of left wing extremism. She frequently criticized the tactics and policies of Leninism and the Bolsheviks, for example. It is unclear what path her politics might have taken if she and Liebknecht had not been martyred by members of the notorious Freikorps. (A group of unemployed, footloose soldiers and thugs, many of whom eventually drifted into National Socialism.)

The film does a reasonably good job of encapsulating Luxemburg's complex theories. All the political ideas are pretty much reduced to Headlines spoken by Big Names (Luxemburg, Karl Kautsky, August Bebel, Carl Bernstein, et. al.), but the film does give you a sense of the range of opinion represented on the left at the time. Thus your opinion of ROSA LXUEMBRUG is less likely to stand or fall on your sympathy with the politics than with whether or not you believe a biography of a major political figure is enriched or cheapened by a heavy attention to her love affairs. Personally, I would prefer more politics, but the affairs are a price worth paying for a decently serious big budget film about a controversial figure.

Aside from a needlessly convoluted time structure, the filmmaking is smooth, quietly restrained throughout. Statuesque, blonde Barbara Sukowa is completely compelling as the short, dark-haried (Jewish) Luxemburg. The film isn't above a little melodrama: the opponents to social democracy for example are at best prigs, at worst sadistic brutes, but there's a lot of sophisticated filmmaking too, especially in the chillingly precise concluding sequences. I hope New Yorker decides to release it on DVD; I'll buy another copy.

But as others have suggested, this film is not a tract. It is less about Rosa Luxemburg the thinker and revolutionary, than it is about Rosa Luxemburg, the human being, and on that level, it works very well indeed. Unlike the reviewer below, I don't have the impression that too much time is devoted to the love story component. Indeed, the scenes with male lovers are fleeting and a little vague; her warm, sisterly friendships with women colleagues are more clearly and effectively portrayed.

I do agree, however, that as in English language film biographies, the characters' political positions tend to expressed, head-line style, in a hurried, sketchy manner. Pay close attention whenever a group of people sit down to dinner or over coffee or a glass of wine; that's when the political banter is about to begin, and you can scarcely follow without a program.

That shouldn't be such a worry, however. Trotta is actually very good at capturing the overall intensity of these internal political debates among revolutinaries, while at the same conveying a sense of the personalities involved. Not always an easy task when a film is as much about the great sweep of history as it is the individuals who drive it (or attempt to).

And speaking of the human element, much of the credit for this nuanced portrait of Rosa Luxemburg is due to Barbara Sukowa's glowing performance. It's a pity that we don't see more of her on this side of the pond. The last film I saw her in was Agniezska Hollander's THIRD MIRACLE--and that was all in flashback with little or no dialog! She deserves better.

The entire cast is actually quite good. Trotta is a skilled director and a thoughtful screenwriter. The cinematography is also impressive in a very unobtrusive way. ROSA LUXEMBURG does seem a bit ponderous and slowly paced at times, although given the solemn subject matter, it's actually hard to call that tendency an artistic failing. Well worth seeing: they don't make many like this any more. Pity.