Rosenstrasse

Margarethe von Trotta's Rosenstrasse (2003) is a strange yet compelling mix of modern Holocaust drama and old-style melodrama that manages to recall, at different moments, such varied movies as Steven Spielberg's Schindler's List (1993), such old-style "women's pictures" as Mitchell Leisen's To Each His Own and Irving Pichel's Tomorrow Is Forever (both 1946), and, seemingly courting disaster, Peter Godfrey's wartime potboiler Hotel Berlin (1945). Almost all of it plays well, however, and in von Trotta's deft hands, it all holds together despite some rough spots at the joins between the genres. The honesty and verisimilitude in the opening sequences in New York ring true and clear; this is essential to the movie, as they're the events that cause Hannah (Maria Schrader) to search out her mother's past in Germany. The scenes in modern Germany have a cool, unseductive honesty that's a stark contrast to the uneasiness of tone (like home movies of a family in agony) in the New York sequences. It's when the movie plunges into its characters' pasts, in extended flashbacks that intercut with contemporary sequences, that it begins firing on all cylinders and engaging in a very careful juggling act. For starters, the depiction of life in wartime Berlin is, perhaps, a bit more evenhanded than Americans are accustomed to, as von Trotta is able to distinguish between such matters as ordinary and extraordinary soldiers (including Lena's brother, Arthur von Eschenbach [Jrgen Vogel], an honored hero from the Eastern front who has lost a leg) and the more virulent, ideologically driven SS men and other dedicated Nazis; she also makes a distinction between those Germans who said and did nothing about the persecution of the Jews and those who resisted, both quietly and openly. Those scenes have a quiet, understated intensity that makes them as compelling as anything else in this movie. When the film focuses on the story of Lena (Katja Riemann, who won the Best Actress award at the Venice Film Festival for her work here) and her husband, Jewish violinist Fabian Fischer (Martin Feifel), the emotions are ratcheted up to a red heat, and when von Trotta brings in the tale of the misplaced Jewish child, Ruth (Svea Lohde), everything catches fire. It's when the story falls back on Hannah and her decision about how (or whether) to tell the 90-year-old Lena (Doris Schade) the truth that it gets dangerously close to an old-style Hollywood women's picture -- recalling such World War II two-handkerchief melodramas as To Each His Own, in which Olivia de Havilland meets the son she gave away for adoption in 1919 when he is a young pilot in 1943 London, and Tomorrow Is Forever, in which an Austrian immigrant who is actually a World War I amnesiac American casualty (Orson Welles) arrives in America in 1939 and meets the wife and son that he lost in 1918. Further, in describing the efforts made to save the men confined by the government -- Jews who were married to Gentile women and specifically exempted from "deportation" (i.e. transportation to concentration camps) -- the script (co-authored by the director and Pamela Katz) veers close to the kind of overheated melodrama of Hotel Berlin, just a little too obvious at times, but not enough to overturn what we've seen before or what comes after. The performances are perfect all around, sufficient to keep us engaged and convinced of the truth and rightness of 99 percent of what we see. Von Trotta pulls all of these divergent parts together in a coherent and compelling fashion, and does so with such skill -- and, ultimately, so engrossingly -- that the 136-minute movie feels like it runs a lot shorter, and is richly rewarding despite a few minor bad turns in the script and plot. ~ Bruce Eder, All Movie Guide

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