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Austrian director Markus Schleinzer brings a chill to his eerie new movie, a stark monochrome period drama set in rural southern Germany in the aftermath of the Thirty Years’ war. It is a film which, for all its grimness, is beautifully shot and as engrossing as a lurid soap opera. It’s a story of gender stereotypes, satirising the central mythic tenet of patriarchal Christianity and depicting humanity’s self-invention through violence and stealth. The chief influence is clearly Michael Haneke’s icy black-and-white film The White Ribbon from 2009, on which Schleinzer worked as casting director; Schleinzer shares with Haneke an interest in leaving the audience with an intractable, insoluble mystery: a problem that won’t tie up.
The drama effectively conflates real-life cases of women passing themselves off as men in early modern Europe with the well-known case history of the French false claimant Martin Guerre. Sandra Hüller gives a superb performance as Rose, a young woman who has been posing as a man all her life and has been a soldier in this guise. She wears dour shapeless clothes, and has the brisk, brusque, economical physical movements of an old soldier; a livid scar that has transformed her face into a worldly and conveniently unfeminine grimace. She says it is the result of a bullet that she now wears around her neck on a cord, a kind of unlucky charm, a reminder of her survival.
After the war, Rose arrived in what she claims is her home village to take family ownership of a derelict but potentially workable farmstead. By recounting local anecdotes that only the genuine claimant could know, Rose convinces the local elders (who have evidently accepted “Rose” as her surname) and almost immediately makes a great success of the farm through her disciplined hard work. She moreover wins the locals’ hearts by killing a marauding bear with her military musket.
A prosperous neighbour agrees to sell Rose a parcel of land on condition that Rose marries his daughter Suzanna (Caro Braun), a plain and promisingly biddable figure of bovine piety and domestic industry. But if Suzanna does not get pregnant, the contract is null and void, and the villagers will begin to talk. So it is with some astonishment that Rose receives extraordinary news from the beaming and placidly innocent Suzanna. How? Who is the father? The question is asked just twice, first put directly by Rose to Suzanna who does not reply. Rose does not pursue it, perhaps assuming some banal infidelity, and in any case grateful for the virgin-birth miracle which has underpinned her growing household wealth.
The second time it is put by the presiding judge to Rose at her trial. She has answered previously with a defiant calm reminiscent of Renée Jeanne Falconetti in Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc, but this time does not reply. The judge also does not press the point, perhaps not wanting to deflect or complicate the prosecution case, or make a potential new land claimant of the biological father. Nor would he want to risk, with Rose’s repeated refusals to answer, creating a martyrdom-mystique around the defendant who is already becoming a celebrity among the excitable public. And there is to be a further, startling disclosure.
Hüller’s quiet, sinewy performance provides the film’s form and musculature; Rose has clearly been through a thousand crises and ordeals on the field of battle and learned the level-headed watchfulness necessary to survive. Braun is also very good as the unexpectedly spirited Suzanna. This is a film about the power and violence that occupies an invisible stratum below the bürgerlich calm, a stratum which becomes obvious when it is challenged. It’s another outstanding star performance from Hüller.
English (US) ·