Time-Warped

The first half-hour of The Legend of Rita is parsed as an action movie. Though I‘m not at all sure that the actual Baader-Meinhof gang could have burst into a bank yelling, ”Down with capitalism!“ and ”Venceremos!“ without drawing giggles all round from the tellers, the dialogue here is, like much of Schlondorff and Wolfgang Kohlhaase’s screenplay, a thrifty piece of shorthand designed to give you the drift of the group‘s intellectual influences. Thereafter the film veers sharply away from politics, a baffling departure for the director of The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum (1975) and The Tin Drum (1979). A strong case could be made that the RAF, for all its vaunted anti-Nazism and advocacy of the working class, was in important respects a continuation of German absolutism by other means. In The Legend of Rita, Schlondorff approaches his material with the gingerly timidity of a man who can’t fully commit to a shift in his views on that branch of the German left. Instead, he opts to put the proverbial human face on terrorism by telling the story of one of its members, a composite figure, presumably, called Rita Vogt (Bibiana Beglau), who senses the group‘s imminent collapse and, under the wing of a sympathetic Stasi apparatchik (Martin Wuttke), disappears into a new life as an upstanding East German proletarian.

The movie’s eye-poppingly reductive, not to say condescending, thesis is that Rita is a tender, vulnerable soul who does whatever she does -- from joining the group through an affair with its leader, to saving the bruised soul of a fellow worker at the East German factory where she works -- for love. In fact, Rita seems to do little but fall in love, not least with the German Democratic Republic, where, amazingly, she fails to notice that just about everyone but she and her handler wants out of the dreary parsimony of life behind the Iron Curtain. The story of Rita‘s successive incarnations as an enthusiastic Communist, and her fall, symbolically timed to coincide with the fall of the Wall, is absorbing enough, due in large measure to Beglau’s vibrant performance. Yet Rita seems to be a woman with little noticeable inner life, and absolutely no capacity for reflection on her deeply compromised past activities. So much so that you begin to feel that you‘re watching some earnest television drama more properly named I Was a Terrorist Love Junkie: The Rita Vogt Story.