The woman and the stranger

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Movie
Original title The woman and the stranger
Country of production GDR
original language German
Publishing year 1985
length 97 minutes
Age rating FSK 12
Rod
Director Rainer Simon
script Rainer Simon, based on a novella by Leonhard Frank
music Reiner Bredemeyer
camera Roland Dressel
cut Helga Gentz
occupation

The Woman and the Stranger is a love and war drama from 1985. The DEFA film was directed by Rainer Simon . In the same year the work received the Golden Bear at the Berlinale . It remained the only film made in the GDR that ever won this award.

action

In the last year of the war, 1918, the two German soldiers Karl and Richard are in Russian captivity. While there is no woman waiting for Karl at home, Richard talks in detail about his Anna. Karl succeeds in escaping captivity and traveling over a thousand kilometers to Germany. He goes to Anna and pretends to be Richard.

Anna is not fooled for a moment that Karl is not Richard. Shortly after the start of the war, however, she was informed by the authorities that Richard had died, and given the shortage of men during the war, she took in the stranger who knew so much about her. They quickly become a couple and sleep together. Karl takes up a job in an ammunition factory and Anna becomes pregnant. But a few months after the end of the war, Richard arrives at the apartment. He is stunned to note that his wife now belongs to his comrade. Anna and Karl leave the apartment and move away.

About the work

Director Rainer Simon wrote the screenplay based on the story Karl and Anna (1926) by Leonhard Frank . After its premiere, the work could only be performed in the GDR for a few months before it was withdrawn from circulation due to legal difficulties with the literary original. In 2008, The Woman and the Stranger came back to the cinemas, whereby the re-performance was also perceived as a new discovery.

The chamber play alternates between color film and sepia shots and borrows stylistic elements from Andrej Tarkowski and Miklós Jancsó . Rainer Simon, who was critical of the GDR state and was monitored by the Stasi, added allusions to his presence in the historical material. There are prisoners who dream of fleeing to the west, where they are threatened with being shot. It deals with "topics like appearance and reality, opportunism and resistance, the problem of loss of identity and the search for oneself".

Reviews

On the occasion of the re-performance in 2008, the critics came to different assessments of the work. “This haunting chamber play reaches us today as if from a double time distance: a carefully built work of art from a sunken land that tells a story from the very early last century,” said Jan Schulz-Ojala from Tagesspiegel . It is "tenderly and cautiously put into words and pictures". The protagonist Anna has "a peculiarly strict gentleness [...]: strict towards herself and mild towards the world". In the film service , Ralf Schenk described the film as a parable and “rich in nuances”. The director urged the actors "to play a reserved, only occasionally eruptive game, without any pathos, but full of self-doubt and irritation."

Andreas Kilb from the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung pointed out that a similar story had already been told more plausibly in The Return of Martin Guerre (1982, with Gérard Depardieu ). The woman and the stranger is "unfortunately just a typical Defa costume film of the eighties: tight, mostly half-close shots, theatrical dialogues, picture-perfect décor and a story that oozes the parabola out of every buttonhole."

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d Jan Schulz-Ojala: Fantasy and Phantom . In: Der Tagesspiegel , June 25, 2008, p. 22
  2. ↑ a b c d Ralf Schenk: A Golden Bear from East Berlin . In: Berliner Zeitung , June 26, 2008, cultural calendar p. 2
  3. ↑ a b Andreas Kilb: Puppet Play . In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung , July 5, 2008, p. 38
  4. ↑ a b Ralf Schenk: The woman and the stranger . In: film-dienst No. 13/2008, p. 32