Well, let's straighten out one thing right away. The title of this film is terribly misleading. This film is not about a "nasty girl" in the sense that we usually hear that phrase. Not that I have anything against nasty girls. They're nice to have around every now and then. It's just that Sonja, the protagonist of this film is not one of them. Matter of fact, she a good deal more like Heidi than Madonna. A more realistic title for the film might have been "The Nosy Girl" or "The Inquisitive Girl." Bright and diligent little Sonja gets called "the nasty girl" by one of her irate neighbors because she's not only inquisitive, but also likes to write about what she's uncovered. The only thing her neighbors hate more than having lies told about them is having the truth told about them – because the truth, in this case, ain't pretty!

Historical Background: The story of this film is an embellished version of the true story of a woman named Anna Elizabeth Rosmus, whose hometown of Passau, in Bavaria, had embraced the Nazi agenda during the war years far more than they cared to admit come the 1980's. In fact, Hitler had lived in Passau, for a while, as a child, and his home had been converted into a museum during the war. No less a personage than Adolf Eichman had married there as well. Ms. Rosmus, who was a writer, had set out to research the town's relationship to the Nazis during the war and had been met by a closing of the ranks among the town authorities and resistance at every level. It took her some ten years and two court actions to gain access to the ecclesiastical archives.

The director of this film, Michael Verhoeven, was born in 1938. He is unrelated to Paul Verhoeven, the director of such films as Robocop and Total Recall and whose film Soldier of Orange (1977) I recently reviewed. Coincidentally, these two directors were born just five days apart! Michael's father was a film director and his name was Paul Verhoeven (1901-1975), but not the Paul Verhoeven that American filmgoers know. Michael Verhoeven is married to Senta Berger. Most of his work as a director has been for German television. Only three of his feature films have received much attention in America: The White Rose (1982), The Nasty Girl (1990), and My Mother's Courage (1995). Verhoeven trained for a career in medicine before turning to filmmaking. Verhoeven is a social activist and his recurrent theme is Germany's revisionist tendencies and repression of its Nazi past.

The Story: The conflicts of Sonja (Lena Stolze) with her neighbors begin before she is even out of the womb! In the Bavarian town of Pfilzing (fictionalized stand-in for Passau), Sonja's mother, pregnant with Sonja, is a teacher at the Catholic school and her superior is concerned that the children may wonder how she came to be in such a condition. She's a married woman but, nevertheless, to the hypocritical headmaster, anything that might stimulate thoughts of sex is a menace. Never mind that sex is all the teenage girls of the school have on their minds already. Sonja is the eldest child of her parents and soon has a little brother and sister. She's a strong-willed child with a mildly exaggerated sense of self-importance. One evening, for example, when she's about six, she decides to "liberate" the fish that's been cooked for dinner by dumping it in the adjacent canal. "Mom always told us God's creations were sacred," she says.

When Sonja reaches high school, she proves to be an able student. Though still agog with devilish innocence, Sonja notices the hypocrisy of her teachers, who pass out copies of test questions in advance to the children whose parents provide the largest donations to the school. Although Sonja's parents are not wealthy enough to fall into the top-donor category, she is nevertheless favored as well because her uncle is a popular priest. Sonja gains the admiration of her entire hometown by winning first place in a national essay contest on the topic of "Freedom in Europe." She wins a trip to Paris and spends most of her time there admiring the statues of naked women and men. Back home, the mayor of her town decorates Sonja with a medal.

When a new contest is announced the next year, Sonja is encouraged to enter again. There's a selection of topics and Sonja chooses "My Hometown During the Third Reich." She sets out to research her topic, as she had done before for her winning essay, but now finds herself up against all sorts of challenges. In the local library, she finds two articles of interest. One mentions a man named Zumtobel, who was mayor during the Third Reich and who was later executed as a Nazi collaborator. The other mentions two priests who gave false testimony that resulted in a Jew being sent to a deathcamp. The names of the priests are omitted. When she tries to learn more, she runs up against a brick wall. Zumtobel's widow is uncooperative as is Juckenack (Hans-Richard Muller), the editor of the local newspaper. She is threatened by neo-Nazis and barred from the library. The town's line is that no one except Zumtobel ever collaborated with the Nazis and that's the fiction they're going to maintain, come what may. Soon the deadline has passed. Sonja decides its just as well because she's been neglecting her burgeoning romance with Martin (Robert Giggenbach), her former schoolteacher. Martin and Sonja are soon married and starting a family.

Several years pass, but Sonja, our junior-Nancy Drew, still can't repress her curiosity about what the town is trying to hide. She enrolls in the local University and takes up the study of history, focusing especially on the local history. One of her professors is the same Juckenack who edits the town's newspaper. She learns that the file pertaining to Zumtobel is housed in the ecclesiastical archives, but she is denied access. First, the refusal is because she needs signed permission from Zumtobel's relatives. When she acquires that from his grandson, the archivist, Schulz (Udo Thomer), adds further stipulations. Sonja sues the town and the court enjoins the town from denying her access to the archives. The archivist now claims that the file is on loan to another party. That continues for several months until the archivist then claims that the documents are too brittle to be handled. Sonja is stonewalled in this manner until one day the archivist is out sick for a day and his temporary replacement, from another town, unwittingly allows Sonja access to the crucial file. Sonja makes copies of as many key papers as she can, in a limited amount of time, and sticks the papers in an envelope addressed to herself. That proves to be a crucial tactic when The Mayor (Richard Suessmeier) discovers that she has been inadvertently permitted to see the Zumtobel file and has her searched on her way out.

Now armed with the evidence of the availability of the file, Sonja goes to the press and uses them to coerce the mayor and the archivist into granting her the access that the court had already declared to be her right. This progress comes at a heavy cost to her personal life. Her family begins to receive threatening phone calls and is snubbed by some of the local businesses. Neo-Nazis toss a couple of bombs into their home. Her husband manages to snuff the fuse on one pack of dynamite but another goes off at the other end of the house. Martin finally becomes exasperated with Sonja's obsession with discovering the truth and moves away to Munich. Sonja's grandmother (Elisabeth Bertram) remains steadfastly in her corner, having herself persevered in her opposition to the Nazis during the war.

Sonja publishes a book based on her findings and is rewarded with three honorary doctorates from prestigious universities in Germany and France. The town leaders demand that she reveal the names of the two priests mentioned in the book who sent a Jew to his death for no better reason than to avoid paying for one-hundred sets of underwear. One is Juckenack and the other the man who is still the local priest. Juckenack sues Sonja for slander and the town is in his corner until a communist from the old days comes forward and offers to testify on Sonja's side. The case gets mysteriously delayed and then dropped. The fickle townspeople now once again embrace Sonja as their heroine and have a bust of her commissioned for installation in the town hall. Sonja, however, throws the ceremony into chaos when she rejects the honor, at the last minute, feeling that the townspeople are simply trying to buy her future silence.

Themes: Verhoeven's main theme, here, is the idea of German disremembrance or convenient repression of its Nazi past. Though his tactic is satire rather than demagoguery or ranting, he makes his point, beginning by naming his fictional town "Pfilzing," which derives from the German word for "retentive." In the revisionist world of the eighties, the townspeople can claim with a straight face that they "had very little to do with the Nazis," despite having betrayed some of their own to the death camps. The Nasty Girl was released in the flush of imminent reunification, which effectively cleaned the slate, for many Germans, in relation to the Nazi era. In that sense, The Nasty Girl can be seen as one last confessional before amnesia sets in altogether. A subsidiary theme is hypocrisy in a small town, such as the routine cheating in a Catholic school for the benefit of the children of the big donors and the sexual repression required by the Catholic clergy, even though all the adolescents think about little else anyway.

Production Values: The most exceptional and controversial aspect of this film is the contrast between its subject matter and its style. Nothing that I've said thus far about this film would prepare you for the kind of film that it is, stylistically. This is no morbid or solemn political exposé. Rather, it is something between satire and black comedy. It is really quite original in its methods and unlike anything I've seen before. At times the film is quasi-documentary. Stolze, as Sonja, turns to the camera and guides us through the story of her life via a voiceover narration. Sometimes, one of the other characters takes up the narration. Then, it will disappear for a while and the story reverts to more or less standard drama. At one point, Sonja breaks into yodeling when she makes an important discovery in her research.

Instead of presenting his message ponderously, Verhoeven pokes fun at the hypocritical characters by presenting their rationalizations in such an exaggerated way that the revisionists and obstructionists are made ridiculous. The main variability in viewpoints about this film is whether the tactic of dealing with such a weighty subject in a seemingly frivolous manner succeeds. My personal reaction to the contrast between the theme and the style was that it is highly original but only moderately effective. The film works as humor or satire but is less successful at delivering its message with any sense of urgency.

Visually, the film is a pastiche of approaches. Several times during the film, Verhoeven advances the story in two separate layers simultaneously. For example, as the current phase of the story is developing in the foreground and Sonja relates some fact about the past, we see her discovery being reenacted in the background in a separate layer. Or, Sonja will be sitting at a desk writing and then, in the middle of the scene, the background lights up to show her now sitting at that same desk in the library. At one point, Sonja walks into the courtroom where her suit against the town is about to be heard and she has a little daydream of herself as a kind of Bavarian Joan of Arc, and we see her fantasy in surreal magnificence. The comedic elements are often Fellinesque. Flashbacks are often presented in black-and-white and present scenes in color.

Among the cast, Lena Stolze has to pretty much carry this film on her delicate shoulders. She provides a perky, energetic performance. Her face, sometimes highlighted by a couple of pigtails, exudes intelligence and emotional depth. She comes across as a headstrong idealist who has a bee under her skirt and she's not going to rest until she's shooed it out. Stolze previously appeared in Verhoeven's films The White Rose (1982).

Bottom-Line: The Nasty Girl was selected by the New York Film Critics' Circle in 1990 as the Best Foreign Film of the year. It also received a nomination for the Academy Award in that category. The Nasty Girl is in German with English subtitles and has a brisk running time of 95 minutes.


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You might want to check out these other excellent films from Germany:

The American Friend
Beyond Silence
The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant
The Blue Angel
Das Boot
The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari
Dr. Mabuse the Gambler
Fitzcarraldo
Kings of the Road
M
The Marriage of Maria Braun
Metropolis
Nosferatu
Pandora's Box
Run Lola Run
Stalingrad
The Testament of Dr. Mabuse
Threepenny Opera
The Tin Drum
Wings of Desire
Zentropa


Recommended:
Yes

Video Occasion: Fit for Friday Evening
Suitability For Children: Suitable for Children Age 13 and Older