neumu [ cinematronic ]




	Rosenstrasse
	Margarethe von Trotta Katja Riemann, Maria Schrader, Martin Feifel, Jürgen Vogel, Jutta Lampe, Doris Schade, Fedja van Huêt, Carola Regnier, Svea Lohde 2003		Made with good intentions and plenty of sympathy for the suffering of its victimized subjects, "Rosenstrasse" — an earnest Holocaust tale from German director/screenwriter Margarethe von Trotta — is heavy on the melodrama. The argument that it deserves to be emotion-drenched because of the weight of its theme is valid, but the fictionalizations can be stagy and manipulative, and the framing sequences in present-day New York and Berlin are often stilted. "Rosenstrasse" is spun from historical circumstance, and those aspects of the film are powerful. In 1943, on a Berlin street called Rosenstrasse, there was a building used by the Nazis as a holding pen for Jewish men rounded up for deportation to the death camps. Hundreds of Aryan women, some of whom were married to Jews, held a vigil outside the lock-up and protested to get their husbands released by the Gestapo. In von Trotta's movie, a little Jewish girl named Ruth (Svea Lohde) is separated from her parents and befriended and protected by musician Lena Fischer (Katja Riemann), a protester hoping to free her husband. Years later, the 90-year-old Lena (Doris Schade) recounts the story of the Rosenstrasse demonstration to Ruth's grown-up daughter Hannah (Maria Schrader), a New Yorker visiting Berlin. Intercut flashbacks dovetail Lena's tale of personal crisis with Ruth's odyssey and Hannah's search for the past.


	Sunday, November 17, 2024





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