FRAULEIN
Directed by Andrea Štaka
Produced by Susann Rüdlinger, Samir Mirjam Quinte & Davor Pušić
Written by Štaka with Barbara Albert & Marie Kreutzer
Released by Film Movement
USA. 92 min. Not Rated
In Swiss-German, German, Bosnian, Croatian and Serbian with English subtitles
Germany/Switzerland. 81 min. Not Rated
With Mirjana Karanović, Marija Škaričić & Ljubica Jović
Special Features: Biographies. Short film: “Happiness” by Sophie Barthes

Émigré, exile, immigrant, refugee – these are state-of-mind distinctions for people living far from their home countries. The three women in Fraulein have a further, stateless complication as they define their lives in Zurich. They were born in a country that no longer exists, Yugoslavia. 

Ruža (Mirjana Karanović) could be any 50-ish Western European businesswoman as she strides purposefully to work and sternly presides over her cafeteria, brooking no nonsense from a flirtatious customer or her employees asking for favors. One of her pestering employees is the matronly Mila (Ljubica Jović), who after a long work day has to listen to her husband prattle on about the expensive renovation of their retirement home back in Croatia.

Into their lives blows a beautiful, young, and mysterious Bosnian, Ana (Marija Škaričić). Losing herself in dancing at clubs, and randomly hooking up with squatters, a musician, and then a yuppie (who in an American version would be her romantic savior), her live-for-today restlessness hides an illness and overwhelming grief from her disrupted life in Sarajevo.

When writer/director Andrea Štaka, in her first fiction feature, finally gets around to bringing the three women together at the canteen, Ana transforms the others, even as she seeks a one pill cure-all for her own problems. Ana induces Ruža to confess that she first came to Switzerland for love, but switched to material success after she was jilted. Ruža finally breaks out into a smile, and even dances and lets loose, an exuberant side actress Karanović didn’t get to reveal as the anguished mother in last year’s Grbavica—it is as if the sun suddenly shines in the restaurant. For Mila, Ana brings out her maternal side, making her realize she wants to stay with her adult children in Switzerland.

For the geography-challenged viewer, it is a struggle to surmise the ethnic or political implications of characters from Belgrade or Sarajevo as the story is told more visually than through spoken explanations. That problem is further complicated when all the subtleties of language and accents are reduced to English subtitles. The actresses, well known in their homelands in film and theater, revert to their native dialects from the Swiss-German they learned phonetically for their parts.

The clues may be lost as to whether Ruža’s canteen is a hangout just for fellow Serbs or those from all over the former Yugoslavia. With the director drawing on her own experiences growing up in Zurich of a Bosnian/Croatian family, the emphasis seems to be that regardless of the consequences of the Balkanization at home, the women have more in common with each other than with the condescending and even brusque Swiss. (They all avoid talking about the war or their lives at home.) Refreshingly and sympathetically told from the women’s point of view, Fraulein wanders until each woman finally makes a defining decision about her future.

The DVD includes Sophie Barthes’ 11-minute short “Happiness,” which takes a more bemused view of Eastern European immigrant women expecting Sex and the City in their lives in the west. Nora Lee Mandel
October 7, 2008