MOVIE REVIEW : ‘The Nasty Girl’ Uncovers the Ghosts of Nazi Past

As “The Nasty Girl” (Friday at Goldwyn Pavilion Cinema) opens, workers in the small, fictitious Bavarian town of Pfilzing scrub furiously at graffiti which demands, “Where were you from 1939-45? Where are you now?” Writer-director Michael Verhoeven has begun to spin black comedy from a city’s black past.

His “nasty” girl is an irrepressible Nazi hunter of the academic kind, pigtailed Sonja Rosenberger, who falls into her calling accidentally. Entering an all-Europe political essay contest when she is 20, Sonja wins West Germany a first prize with her decidedly uncontroversial paper. Her new status as a hometown celebrity only whets her appetite for greater success.

So, having grown up with stories of local anti-fascist heroics, Sonja enters another contest, this time writing about “My Hometown During the Third Reich.” Instead of cooperating, as she knows they will be happy to do, the burghers of Pfilzing react like bee-stung bears. To the best of their recollection there was only one known Nazi in the town and he is long dead. Unstoppable, Sonja discovers a newspaper article from 1934 in the town archives in which two local clergymen denounced a Jewish businessman, with ominous results. This time it is Sonja who is denounced and ostracized; neo-Nazis even strong-arm her and her family.

Marriage and two babies in quick succession turn down Sonja’s investigative zeal, but not for long. Balancing the demands of two children and a loving but increasingly conservative husband (Robert Giggenbach), Sonja crusades, threatens, sues and uses her wits to pry “classified” documents out of the town archives.

Verhoeven’s stylized, satiric comedy comes from real roots. For Pfilzing, substitute picturesque Passau, on three rivers in deepest Bavaria, the seat of that country’s Catholic Archdiocese, “a Baroque Eden.” It was also where Adolf Hitler spent his youth, where Ernst Kaltenbrunner, chief of the Nazi security forces lived and where Adolf Eichmann was married.

In 1960, Passau was the birthplace of the movie’s real Sonja, Anja Elisabeth Rosmus, whose upstanding middle-class family saw to it that their bright daughter had a sound parochial school education. In 1984, it was Anja Elisabeth’s second essay that put Passau on the map again, in ways its citizens did not appreciate and with consequences to Rosmus as vicious as the movie’s. Anonymous callers suggested it was she who should have been in a concentration camp, “gassed, chopped up and pulverized.”

Verhoeven cares too much about his subject to be leaden about its presentation. Casting impeccably throughout, he tells his story in a theatrical mixture of colors and styles: black-and-white as Sonja narrates events before her birth; colors with the sentimental look of hand-tinted scrapbooks for her light-hearted memories of her childhood, school days and courtship; bright colors and projected backgrounds for present-day events.

The Alice in Wonderland quality to Sonja’s investigations is heightened by these rear projections--not unlike the technique Hans Jurgen Syberberg used in “Our Hitler.” Something about the sight of a middle-class German living room suite, seemingly whirling about a town square like the Giant Teacup Ride, while the family seated on it confers earnestly about threats to their lives, gives “The Nasty Girl” its darkly comic effect.

The writing has a nice edge, political and otherwise. During Sonja’s brief hometown-heroine days, everyone crowds in for a share of the credit. “Sonja had our worm pills when she was a girl,” the local pharmacist crows. Her response when Sonja, now the town pariah, needs medicine for one of her children, is equally crass.

Struggling over her first essay, “Freedom in Europe” Sonja faces the dilemma of how to characterize Greece in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s--it is a member of NATO, but how can it be called a democracy under the dictatorship of the colonels? Loftily, her local librarian advises her to say, simply, “Greece is the cradle of democracy,” and sure enough, with such comforting generalities national prizes are won.

Sonja, who at times yodels out of sheer high spirits, is played by Lena Stolze, an irresistible actress whose puckish comic side may come as a surprise to those with good movie memories. Stolze made her film debut as the 21-year-old student and WWII resistance fighter Sophie Scholl, a sort of anti-Nazi Joan of Arc, guillotined in 1943. Stolze starred in two exceptional versions of the stubborn young martyr’s life, “The White Rose,” for “Nasty Girl’s” Michael Verhoeven and “The Last Days”--on television just this week--for writer-director Percy Adlon.

“The Nasty Girl” (Times-rated Mature for a story unlikely to interest very young children) won Verhoeven the Berlin Film Festival prize as best director early this year, probably the most fortuitous time imaginable for an expose of German hypocrisy. At Chicago’s just-concluded film festival, the blithe Stolze won best actress: Could it have been the yodel?