Kolloschwarer Reviews

Sexy Sadie (1996)

Some very fine acting there

[9/10 · 28 January 2009]

I thought this slightly weird movie was not only funny, not only captivating, but also well written and above all, very well acted.

It's really remarkable what you can do with such a minuscule budget. If I remember it well, they spent some 100,000 deutschmarks on it. They even shot it in black and white for lack of money. But they had the fortune of getting one of former East Germany's top actresses, and there are two scenes in it that I've loved each time I watched it, and that I've been longing to see again for many years now - unfortunately, the movie is still not available on DVD or video or anything.

If you've seen the movie: I'm talking about the bed scene and the gun weighing scene at the end. If you haven't: I won't give anything away, still in the hope that this movie might resurface some day - it's certainly worth being rediscovered.

Die Schauspielerin (1988)

Best acting there can be

[9/10 · 28 January 2009]

This is a story about an impossible love: a Jewish actor and a German actress fall in love in the 3rd Reich. She, the "healthy blue-eyed blonde" is being selected for a huge film career as the "arian ideal", while he has to withdraw to the Jewish Theatre in Berlin, which at this point is still kept alive by the Nazis, sort of as an alibi.

This might be one of the movie's weak spots: The Jewish Theatre is depicted as some sort of safe haven, the only place where Jewish actors could survive within the "Reich" and still act, earn money, live rather undisturbed - while the spectator, from today's perspective, knows that in fact this safety didn't last very long. Yet, the movie doesn't comment on this at all, it ends before that.

I've watched this movie 20 years ago, when I was myself becoming an actor. Now, why do I still remember it?

On the one hand, I really found the story quite thrilling. I lived in a dictatorship myself at that time, and this story of two people trying to get by in spite of an almighty and barbaric regime caught me. Though of course, as a censored East-German film, it had to have its "political correct" message, too, which was, basically, that the Nazis were the "bad guys" which would automatically make "us", the allegedly modern and "tolerant" communist societies, the "good guys". Yet, on the hidden level, it could also be read as an attack on abusive dictatorship in general, i.e. the communist ones as well.

But most of all - and this is the reason why I just have to rate it 9 out of 10 - I remember it because of Corinna Harfouch's brilliant acting.

Here comes the big SPOILER ALERT: At the end of the movie, the actress decides to disguise as a Jewess and audition for the role of Judith at the Jewish Theatre. The movie ends with this auditioning, where parallels are made between this film, the situation of the Jews, Hebbel's play "Judith", and the German and the invented Jewish actress' characters. Hadn't I seen this movie, I wouldn't have believed that this can actually be done - but Corinna Harfouch managed: In this complex situation the character is in, you can really see and hear all these layers, each one for itself: the German actress playing a Jewish actress who plays Hebbel's Judith in the setting of the 3rd Reich. The acting itself becomes the climax of this film, and it is this scene that first made me a fan of Corinna Harfouch's.