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| Barbara Sukowa in Rosa Luxemburg |
Cast: Barbara Sukowa, Daniel Olbrychski, Otto Sander, Adelheid Arndt, Jürgen Holtz, Doris Schade, Hannes Jaenicke, Jan Biczycki, Karin Baal, Winfried Glatzeder, Regina Lemnitz. Screenplay: Margarethe von Trotta. Cinematography: Franz Rath. Film editing: Dagmar Hirtz, Galip Iyitanir. Music: Nicolas Economou.
An unconventional woman gets a too-conventional biopic in Margarethe von Trotta's Rosa Luxemburg. The tragedy of the Rosa Luxemburg played by Barbara Sukowa is that she's a humanist among ideologues, an idealist among power players, and most damning of all, a woman among men. I kept wanting von Trotta to amp up the feminism of her portrait, which is full of scenes of Rosa surrounded by graybeards who are armored against her passion for the struggles of the proletariat. It's a film that should have been a documentary, if only because most of its viewers today are not quite up on the who's who, the where's where, and the when's when of the struggles of European Marxists in the first two decades of the 20th century. Rosa Luxemberg works mainly as a spur to further study: I learned more from scanning the Wikipedia article on her than I did from the film itself, though that's a frequent failing of biopics. Still, if you're armed with a modicum of background knowledge, von Trotta's film is a good introduction to an extraordinary person.
