'The Legend of Rita': A Young Terrorist Changes Her Identity, Not Her Ideals
By A. O. SCOTT
"The Legend of Rita" opens with a bank robbery and looks back, with sympathy and a bit of nostalgia, at a time when robbing banks really meant something. The idealistic young people shown relieving some unlucky West Berliners of their Deutsche marks are not just going, like Willie Sutton, where the money is, but as they see it, striking a blow at the heart of capitalism. Ownership is theft, they tell their victims, quoting the 19th-century French socialist Pierre Prudhon. Their goal, a retrospective voice-over explains, is to abolish injustice and the state.
Given that the particular state they sought to abolish, the Federal Republic of Germany, is now nearly twice as big as it was at the time, these bank robbers -- based on real-life members of the Red Army Faction, a left-wing terrorist group active in Germany through the 1970's -- could have been easy targets for mockery. Since their tactics also included firebombings and assaults on police officers, they could just as easily have been demonized.
But Volker Schlöndorff, who directed the film and wrote the screenplay in collaboration with Wolfgang Kohlhaase, is less interested in scoring moral points than in exploring the feeling and logic of intense political commitment. The film's protagonist -- a fictitious young woman named Rita Vogt (Bibiana Beglau), whose life Mr. Schlöndorff and Mr. Kohlhaase have taken pains to make historically plausible -- is sometimes ridiculous and occasionally frightening, but she is also thoroughly human and at times convincingly heroic.
At the beginning, in what her voice-over recalls as the glory days of radical militancy, Rita is an embodiment of revolutionary glamour. Whether plotting a jailbreak, arguing dialectics or making love with her comrade Andi (Harald Schrott), she seems possessed by a luminous fervor, an utter seriousness of purpose that is also a form of joy. Soon, though, her life changes. After she kills a Paris police officer, her group takes refuge in East Germany. While the others eagerly fly off to find kindred souls in Beirut, Rita decides to stay in East Germany under a false identity -- the "legend" of the title -- living as an ordinary worker in the workers' paradise.
"Our job is to make people happy," her solicitous Stasi handler (slyly played by Martin Wuttke) tells her. He may be speaking ironically, but Rita takes his words at face value. Working at a fabric dyeing plant, returning home to her small apartment in a huge complex, shopping in a drab state-run supermarket, she glows with socialist fulfillment and seems honestly perplexed by the cynicism and discontent of her fellow citizens. Her first legend -- that she is Susanne Schmidt, who has defected from the West after the death of her parents -- is met with incredulity by her co-workers, who long to escape the gray sameness of their daily lives.
What's remarkable about this part of the film is that it captures both points of view. Ms. Breglau is so intuitive and charismatic an actress that you're drawn to her character's side by the steely grace of her certainty. She also has a genuine capacity for fraternity and solidarity. Even though her life is a lie, she seems less duplicitous than anyone around her, and she wins the love of an alcoholic factory worker (Nadia Uhl) and then a young physics student (Alexander Beyer) as well as a certificate for "exemplary socialist labor."
Mr. Kohlhasse, who lived for many years in East Germany, has a good ear for socialist cant, and he and Mr. Schlöndorff play it in a kind of moral stereo: one channel for good faith, one for bad.
In a climactic scene just after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Rita -- who has moved on to a second legend -- berates her colleagues for giving up so easily on a noble experiment and warns them of everything they are about to lose in rushing to join the capitalist world.
"She's insane," one of them mutters, but the scene is, if I may revert to Marxist jargon, a genuinely dialectical moment, in which opposing pictures of the world are given equal authenticity and force. And while the filmmakers adopt a detached naturalism in detailing the crimes Rita and her friends have committed, the disgust that the ordinary East Germans express toward the Western terrorists who claim to be their allies provides a devastating and unanswerable critique.
For Mr. Schlöndorff, "The Legend of Rita," which opens today at the Film Forum, is a return to the politically urgent, ethically complex and clear-sighted filmmaking that marks his strongest work. Though he is best known in this country for "The Tin Drum," the magic realism of that film -- to say nothing of the sour allegory of "The Handmaid's Tale" -- suits him less well than the more conventional psychological kind on display here.
In its clarity and intensity (as well as its subject matter) this movie recalls "The Lost Honor of Katarina Blum," his 1975 adaptation of Heinrich Böll's novel, and "Circle of Deceit," a story of intrigue and fanaticism filmed in Beirut at the height of the Lebanese civil war.
The American release of this film seems especially timely, given the recent revelations about the youthful political activities of the German foreign minister, Joschka Fischer. But even without that added relevance, "The Legend of Rita" would be a powerful document, an attempt to reckon with a recent history too easily airbrushed by triumphalism and complacency.
THE LEGEND OF RITA
Directed by Volker Schlöndorff; written (in German, with English subtitles) by Wolfgang Kohlhaase with Mr. Schlöndorff; director of photography, Andreas Höfer; edited by Peter Przygodda; music by the Rolling Stones, Frank Schöbel and Silly; art director, Susanne Hopf; produced by Arthur Hofer and Emmo Lempert; released by Kino International. At the Film Forum, 209 West Houston Street, South Village. Running time: 101 minutes. This film is not rated.
WITH: Bibiana Beglau (Rita), Martin Wuttke (Hull), Nadja Uhl (Tatjana), Harald Schrott (Andi), Alexander Beyer (Jochen) and Jenny Schily (Friederike).