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ROSENSTRASSE
Directed & Written by: Margarethe von Trotta.
Produced by: Richard Schöps, Henrik Meyer & Markus Zimmer.
Director of Photography: Ranz Rath.
Edited by: Corina Dietz.
Music by: Loek Dikker.
Released by: Samuel Goldwyn.
Language: German with English subtitles.
Country of Origin: Germany. 136 min. Rated: PG-13.
With: Katja Riemann, Maria Schrader, Doris Schade & Jutta Lampe.

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
August 20, 2004

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