What I consider Volker Schlöndorff's best film, his adaptation of Heinrich Böll's novel The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum (1975) focused on the infantile leftist children of Mao and the Jimi Hendrix, and/or of Che Guevera and Rolling Stones, the Red Army Faction (RAF called the "Baader-Meinhof gang" or simply "terrorists") whose bank robberies and killings provoked a massive wave of repression in West Germany at the end of the 1960s. Katharina Blum was the girlfriend of one of the RAF fugitives. The start of Schlöndorff's 2000 movie "Die Stille nach dem Schuß" seems to return to the romantic self-conception of the RAF as urban guerrillas playing at making revolution and playing at being Robin Hood, shows bank robbers who have brought muffins for the customers inconvenienced by a holdup and who dump a bag of change into a beggar's hat before fleeing.

The jump-cuts recall the early French New Wave (Schlöndorff was an assistant to Louis Malle, Jean-Pierre Melville, and Alain Resnais). The light-heartedness goes up in smoke when a jail break leaves a leftist attorney dead. The terrorists flee to East Berlin and go on to Beirut. Returning to East Berlin from unshown activities in Beirut, the carry-on bag of Rita Vogt (Bibiana Beglau) is examined. It contains a loaded pistol. Erwin Hull (Martin Wuttke), the Stasi (secret police) agent who talks to her gives her his number, removes the bullets, and returns the gun.

Bored in Paris as the revolution fails to progress in western Europe, Rita shoots a motorcycle policeman (whose concern was her riding a motorcycle without a helmet) and her group flees to East Germany. They want to be shipped to Angola or Mozambique to aid The Revolution, but the cautious East German bureaucracy thinks they will stand out too obviously in Africa and offers to provide them new identities as workers in the socialist state. They must not contact each other.

They agree and the movie follows Rita, who is assigned work in an old-fashioned textile mill. The "legend" provided her is that her parents were killed and she immigrated out of socialist fervor. This is incomprehensible to those who have grown up and are living in the "workers' paradise." After forming a lesbian bond with a heavy-boozing coworker, Tatjana (Nadja Uhl), Rita is recognized from a West German tv broadcast following the gunning down of some of her RAF comrades.

Hull provides her another "legend" and she goes to work in a recreation agency that arranges summer camp along the Baltic coast for children. There she has a romance with Jochen, a young nuclear physicist who is a lifeguard during the summer (the very attractive Alexander Beyer). He is going to the Soviet Union and wants to marry her and take her along. By now, it is 1989 and masses of East Germans are being allowed to leave. The bureaucrats do not want their having provided refuge for terrorists to become public knowledge, and forbid the marriage.

Then the Soviet empire and the Berlin wall are crumbling, the Stasi are destroying records, and no longer able to protect Rita and her surviving RAF comrades. The real-life survivors all were tried and convicted with sentences up to 15 years, but Schlöndorff and his co-scenarist Wolfgang Kohlhaase (who lived in East Germany most of his life) provide a more melodramatic ending, seeming to revert to Godard ("Breathless" in particular).

The movie seems fairly drab once it settles into the portrayal of the difficulties of a revolutionary idealist settling down in the socialist state and seeing how disaffected those who had no choice in the matter are, but the relationships and how they are compromised by Rita living lies (the "legends" concocted to explain her past) are interesting, particularly in her two romances.

On the fairly dry commentary track Schlöndorff notes that critics from the former West Germany attacked the movie for providing an insufficiently harsh portrait of East Germany, whereas those who had lived in East Germany thought it accurate. The Stasi treatment of Tatjana is quite harsh, and the wish to make the rare refugees from the west happy enough to stay (because they might be useful to the regime) show the cynicism of the East German bureaucracy, and people did swim and make love in East Germany. There were, perhaps, even some sympathetic Stasi agents, who were also pawns in games played by higher-ups. And true believers (such as the mother in "Good Bye Lenin," a more comic take on nostalgia for state socialism after the triumph of consumerism—in which Alexander Beyer also appeared nude, but was grumpier).

Schlöndorff and Kohlhaase portray characters with some likable traits who do things that harm others rather than cartoon villains (I'd include "little Oskar" from "The Tin Drum" in this category, the double agent from Coup de Grâce, and certainly the innocent played by John Malkovich in The Ogre). Viewers (especially American ones accustomed to simplifications telling them what to think) are perplexed about where Schlöndorff stands. I think he stands on no side, showing misdeeds of ordinary, unheroic human beings. (Actually, the one character who strikes me as having no redeeming features is Rita's RAF boyfriend, Andi.) He shows some nostalgia for the naiveté of the generation of '68 that was to a degree his own.

Schlöndorff is interested in sociopolitical ideas, but does not have a platform. He seems very good at eliciting portrayals of complex, compromised people—in this instance from a cast with little or no movie experience. In a small part as Frederike, Jenny Schilly is especially good, and the two female leads split a best actress award at the 2000 Berlin Film Festival, where the movie received the "best European film" award, and political criticism from many sides.

Just as I don't think that this is the place for anyone not familiar with Schlöndorff's earlier films to start, I don't think that his commentary track would be as interesting to those unfamiliar with his commentary tracks about his earlier movies, "Honor" in particular. He explains the composite of experiences of different RAF refugees to the East and expresses some frustration at the constraints of historical fidelity.

It's not a great film, but intriguing for those interested in the political after-effects of the 1960s student revolts (e.g., Bertolucci's "Dreamers") and in the more general representation of historical changes crushing individual pursuits of happiness. There is no musical score, though the opening has the Stones' "Street-fighting man" and Sting's "If you love somebody, set them free" is deployed later. A more entertaining (comic) tale of people undercover perplexed by the end of the Cold War was the 1991 "Sleepers" about KGB "sleepers" (Nigel Havers and Warren Clarke) who had become integrated into English life.


(My title is the final pronouncement of the movie, reflecting that the stories of several RAF members hidden in East Germany were drawn upon for a sort of docudrama about the two Germanys prior to 1990.)




Recommended:
Yes

Viewing Format: DVD
Suitability For Children: Not suitable for Children of any age