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Reviews of Recent Independent, Foreign, & Documentary Films in Theaters and DVD/Home Video
ROSENSTRASSE
Set in contemporary New York as well as Nazi Germany, Rosenstrasse's
scattered storylines clamor for focus before being anticlimactically resolved.
First, there's the friction between Hannah (Maria Schrader) and her suddenly
very observant Jewish mother Ruth (Jutta Lampe), who has forbidden her
daughter from marrying her non-Jewish boyfriend. When Hannah discovers that
her mother was sheltered from the Nazis by a Christian woman in Berlin, she
flies there and tracks down Lena (Doris Schade). As if there wasn't enough going
on in the film, the young woman lies to the 90 year old, telling her she is a
historical researcher. Probing her past, Lena narrates her life as an aristocratic
Aryan woman married to a Jewish man. Also told through flashbacks is the plight of
eight-year-old Ruth, who hides from the Gestapo as her mother is
interned in the former Jewish Welfare Office on Rosenstrasse. Lena's (Katja
Riemann) husband is also being held to be shipped off to the East.
While holding vigil, Lena befriends the girl, now alone and homeless. They are
joined by more Aryan women demanding that their husbands be freed.
Writer/director Margarethe von Trotta only skims the surface of the film's many
conflicts. This is a script that screams to be streamlined. What should have been
the heart of the film becomes an instant surrogate mother/daughter bond rather
than an evolving relationship. The young Ruth seems so much at home with
Lena it's hard to believe they have only been together for seven days. There's no
follow through in Hannah's deception of the elderly Lena, and for the grown-up
Ruth, resentments and painful memories are easily dismissed. Kent Turner
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