Returning to Berlin and a Life Divided

In its shimmering new setting in the mirrored-glass maze of office towers at Potsdamer Platz, the Berlinale celebrated its 50th year with all the glitz and dazzle its founders could only dream of when the German film festival opened here in the post-World War II rubble.

Lavish parties atop the new 25-story Sony Center and stargazing crowds thronging the Stella Theater for a glimpse of Hollywood heartthrobs Matt Damon, Leonardo DiCaprio and George Clooney baptized the new cultural heart of Berlin with a showering of celebrity and spotlighted glamour.

But little of the Tinseltown glow has rubbed off on Volker Schlondorff, Germany’s most famous resident director, whose premiere of “Rita’s Legends” in the festival’s competition was notable for its reconstruction of the shabby reality of life on this side of Berlin during the Communist era.

From the spooky plywood booths at East German border crossings to the graffiti-besmirched halls of apartment houses to the hip-level bedside lamps that made reading an endeavor for contortionists, the film records every substandard furnishing and detail of a backward existence.

In the first serious examination of the social, psychological and material differences between east and west Germans since the Berlin Wall fell more than a decade ago, “Rita’s Legends” by Babelsberg Studios and ArtHaus distributors sheds light on the mental divide persisting between Ossies and Wessies--eastern and western Germans.

And although Schlondorff hopes for commercial success for the first time since his return to a reunited Germany from the United States in 1990, he acknowledges that his film, which is nostalgic but hardly a feel-good movie, is likely to push a lot of uncomfortable buttons.

“The message is basically that we are really all alike, and a lot of people are not going to want to deal with that,” says the director, who won an Oscar for best foreign-language film in 1979 with “The Tin Drum.”

Indeed, the characters of his drama are people with whom few would want to identify: Rita (Bibiana Beglau), the retired terrorist seeing the bleak life of East Germany through a revolutionary’s rose-colored glasses; Tatjana (Nadja Uhl), the disillusioned alcoholic textile worker who arouses a latent lesbian impulse in Rita; and Erwin (Martin Wuttke), the idealistic agent of the hated Stasi state security agency, who blindly follows the party line to its humiliating conclusion.

The film, scheduled to come to theaters in Germany and the United States in the fall, may yet succeed--at least in its homeland--for the bittersweet resurrection of forgotten details. From the ritualistic summer beach holidays for the working masses on the Baltic Sea to the small-time celebrations showering wine and flowers on laborers for meager achievements, the film may serve as a poignant reminder to those yet to prosper from reunification of what was good about the old days.

“Less wealth and less poverty,” as Rita points out to cynical colleagues during a naive rant about the benefits of the East’s system.

Scenes Evoke History and Provoke Lawyers

The plot is an actual page from postwar history, as Communist East Germany gave refuge to some of West Germany’s most-wanted leftist radicals, including members of the notorious Baader-Meinhof gang and the Red Army Faction that evolved from the original group of anti-establishment extremists. As with the purportedly fictional Rita, those real-life terrorists taking cover in the East were exposed to arrest by West Germany’s federal intelligence service when the Berlin Wall opened in 1989 and the Stasi lost its hold on the underground networks.

Being too true to life in creating the composite character of Rita has drawn charges of copyright infringement against Schlondorff and screenplay writer Wolfgang Kohlhaase. Coinciding with Wednesday’s premiere, former Red Army Faction terrorist Inge Viett claimed through her Hamburg publisher that the film’s title role is a thinly disguised retelling of her own life’s story, including her killing of a police officer in France who stopped her for a traffic infringement. Viett, who lived undercover in East Germany for seven years before the Wall fell, was visited by Kohlhaase in jail when he first got the idea for the film script, which she claims is based on her 1996 memoir “Never Was I More Fearless.”

The true-life terrorist collaborated with Kohlhaase on the film script until deciding midway through the project that his presentation was not political enough.

German film critics also contend the film is lacking in passion, despite its characters’ springing from one of the most notorious terrorist movements in Western capitalist states during the 1970s and 1980s. The DPA news agency called the cast “bloodless,” although it lauded the filmmakers for the laser-sharp accuracy of the backdrop.

“It was hard to find traces of the old East. The changes have been enormous, despite what the pessimists say,” Schlondorff said of his search through eastern Germany for run-down factories and crumbling housing in which to film his story.

The East of the Communist era was a colorless landscape of broken pavement, cloudy window glass and soot-stained streets lacking billboards, flowers and free spirit. Today, Schlondorff noted, it is no longer possible to tell East from West at a glance.

Looking Toward Competition’s End

Whether his accurate capturing of the East’s defensiveness and drabness will be enough to win the Golden Bear is to be decided at the Berlinale’s Sunday finale. The other 20 films in competition include seven recent U.S. releases: “The Talented Mr. Ripley,” “Magnolia,” “The Beach,” “Three Kings,” “The Hurricane,” “Any Given Sunday” and “Man on the Moon.”

“The Million Dollar Hotel,” starring Mel Gibson and Milla Jovovich, opened the 12-day Berlinale but is competing as a German entry, despite its Hollywood production, on the basis of director Wim Wenders’ nationality.

A third German film vying against the U.S. blockbusters and entries from around the world is “Paradise: Seven Days With Seven Women,” directed by Rudolf Thome, who told journalists he was honored to be in such illustrious company but had little expectation of taking a prize.