Isolde Barth Movies

Marianne (Sabine Wegner) has just endured an unhappy ending to an unhappy marriage, and is determined to gather the underappreciated parts of herself together to make a fresh start in life. Where better to do that than in the place where she grew up? She takes her eight-year old daughter (Daniela Schleicher) to the North Sea hotel she grew up in, and there the two of them go through many changes. Her daughter tries to make sense out of the vivid and often hopeless lives of the hotel's tenants, including that of her mother's sister, and Marianne tries to reassert her adulthood when a new romance takes her just a little too far back into her childhood for comfort. ~ Clarke Fountain, All Movie Guide

Henry Miller's novels were almost entirely autobiographical, and concerned not only his environment and friends, but also recorded his many sexual exploits - which he apparently viewed with something like spiritual awe. Despite his sexual obsessions, his novels are respected worldwide for their brilliant depictions of time and place, and have occasionally been made into movies. This 1990 film by Claude Chabrol makes a reportedly poor effort to bring the novel Quiet Days In Clichy to the screen, and transforms the seedy exploits of a penniless expatriate in Paris to the boyish pleasures of a couple of sweet-faced middle class lads who hang out in expensive whorehouses and go to cocktail parties with fashionable people. ~ Clarke Fountain, All Movie Guide

If director Ernst Witzel intended a deeper message behind the drunken partying of three old school chums as they spend a weekend carousing in the woods, then that message is well hidden. The three friends meet an ex-stormtrooper, reminisce on their school days, and one of them sleeps with an old female flame from the past. Now there are only the hangovers to be considered, as they leave to face another week at work in their respective professions. ~ Eleanor Mannikka, All Movie Guide

In this fictionalized version of the sensational Marie Bachmeier case of the early 1980s, Marianne Grunwald (Bachmeier), played by Gudrun Landgrebe wears tight clothing and revealing blouses and occupies center stage from beginning to end. Director Burkhard Driest has placed his female star, rising in West Germany at this time, on the crest of the story. The drama opens with Marianne, her 7-year-old daughter Anna, and Marianne's live-in companion in their home in the country. Marianne has just sold a bar and has a little money to spend before she eventually buys a new place in the city -- which she does, and when the bar opens it is very popular because of Marianne's obvious physical appeal. But her personal life is not ideal, and her lover has talked about leaving. Meanwhile, a doctor and his wife want to adopt Anna. Marianne finally agrees to the adoption, and just as the couple are about to start the legal process, Anna disappears. Her strangled and sexually abused body was found later, with the accused criminal (Klaus Grabowski in real life) captured soon thereafter. Marianne is again the focus at the end of the movie, when the courtroom proceedings are set in motion and she pulls out her handgun, making a decision that will change her life forever. For some viewers, this version of Marie Bachmeier's story will trivialize the human tragedy at the core of the events, placing more emphasis on an actress' physical attributes than a mother's anguish. ~ Eleanor Mannikka, All Movie Guide

In this curiously irresolute drama, Gabriele (Barbara Rudnik) is a young woman who lives at home in her wealthy parents' apartment, but dreams of returning to Australia to join her Aussie boyfriend. He keeps in touch by mailing her taped messages and a video of their good times together on the beach. She, in turn, is studying marine biology and working at a peep show at night so she can save some money to join him. Her nighttime job introduces new people into her life -- everyone from her manager who lusts after her, to the women who work in the peep shows, and the taxi driver who takes her to work each night. An uneasy sense of foreboding slowly takes over, raising the question of whether she may finally return to Australia or not. All this might be more compelling if the acting were less stylized and the script a little more convincing. ~ Eleanor Mannikka, All Movie Guide

A strange and some might say warped, erotic drama from director Robert Van Ackeren, Die Reinheit des Herzens is a nearly abstract look at the changes in one woman's inner self. Lisa (Elisabeth Trissenaar) is married to a down-and-out writer who one day forces her into a liaison with a book thief. Lisa works in a bookstore and caught the thief stealing. The result was the unwanted erotic relationship that eventually changes the way Lisa looks at herself and her family. As her husband goes from bad to worse, she starts to reconsider her affair, yet in the end, her husband's alienation and her own responses to her life are nothing the normal family would want to emulate. ~ Eleanor Mannikka, All Movie Guide

Having made as many films as he had years, at 31, Rainer Werner Fassbinder essayed a slightly different approach for his 32nd film, Despair. Here, he uses a witty screenplay written by the well-known playwright Tom Stoppard, based on a novel by Vladimir Nabokov. Furthermore, the entire film, set in 1930s Germany, is in English. It received mixed reviews, if only because it is so unlike the director's other works. In the story, a Russian owner of a German chocolate-factory, whose business and marriage are both on the rocks, fantasizes about leaving his current life, and living another one. Indeed, he has delusions that he is somehow outside himself, watching himself live his life. So strong is his desire to alter his life that when he encounters a tramp while on a brief business trip, he imagines that the man looks exactly like him, decides to exchange identities with the tramp, and murders him. ~ Clarke Fountain, All Movie Guide

The Serpent's Egg, or Das Schlangenei is director Ingmar Bergman's second English language production (The Touch was his first). It is, however, his first completely non-Swedish production, made after his voluntary self-exile from Sweden over taxation issues. Set in Berlin in the early 1920s, it explores the fear and despair the city evokes in Manuela and Abel Rosenberg (Liv Ullmann and David Carradine), two Jewish trapeze artists. The suicide of Manuela's husband (Abel's brother), has stranded them in Berlin. Berlin is shown to already possess the sinister elements of cruelty and anti-Semitism which laid the groundwork for the later Nazi takeover. A series of misadventures gets them sent to a medical clinic for treatment. However, the clinic is actually a site for Nazi-type "racial" experiments on humans, which generally either madden or kill the subjects. Das Schlangenei was savaged by the critics for its improbable-seeming story and more particularly, for casting David Carradine (best known for his earlier appearances in the Kung Fu U.S. television series) in a crucial role. ~ Clarke Fountain, All Movie Guide

A sailor learns to take, and give, it like a man in this surrealistic adaptation of writer and thief Jean Genet's novel Querelle de Brest by avant-garde German director Rainer Werner Fassbinder. In a colorful brothel in the port of Brest, proprietor Nono (Gunther Kaufmann) is known for wagering with his customers. Win a throw of the dice, and they get to make love with his wife, Lysiane (Jeanne Moreau); lose, and they must take it from behind by Nono himself. One day, Lysiane reads the tarot for her lover, Robert (Hanno Poschl), and learns in the cards of his intense passion for his brother, Querelle (Brad Davis). Querelle himself soon arrives, and the brothers enact a bizarre greeting halfway between a hug and a wrestling match. Querelle, it seems, is looking for partners in a drug deal; Robert points him in the right direction. An argument about the merits of sex between men soon leads Querelle to murder his fellow smuggler, Vic (Dieter Schidor). Back at the whorehouse, Querelle loses on purpose to Nono and finds he has a taste for passive gay sex. Meanwhile, fellow sailor Gil, who looks exactly like Querelle's brother (and is played by the same actor), murders one of his compatriots after the brute publicly impugns his manhood. Wanted by the police for both his own crime and Querelle's, Gil goes on the lam. Querelle soon crashes his hideout, and an intense bond develops between the two murderers -- a friendship that will lead Querelle to the greatest love, and the greatest treachery, of his life. Director Fassbinder was in the process of editing Querelle when he died of a drug overdose in June 1982. Gunther Kaufmann, who plays Nono, was Fassbinder's ex-lover; the film is dedicated to another former lover, El Hedi Ben Salem, the news of whose suicide had just reached the director. Critically derided even by many of Fassbinder's admirers, Querelle earned a Golden Raspberry award for Worst "Original" Song for "Each Man Kills the Thing He Loves," an Oscar Wilde poem set to music by Peer Raben and sung repeatedly by Jeanne Moreau. Moreau had previously starred in Mademoiselle, a Tony Richardson effort co-scripted by Genet. Look for Frank Ripploh, another pioneering German director, in a cameo. ~ Brian J. Dillard, All Movie Guide

Part of Rainer Werner Fassbinder's The Entire History of the German Federal Republic trilogy, Lola stars Barbara Sukowa in the title role, a seductive cabaret singer and dancer in the 1950s who is romantically involved with Von Bohm (Armin Mueller-Stahl), a straight-as-an-arrow building inspector. Recently appointed Building Commissioner, Von Bohm is committed to eradicating corruption. Consequently, he's given quite a shock when he is called into inspect the brothel where Lola works and discovers her dancing there. With that, Von Bohm is left to question whether he is more loyal to the woman he loves so passionately or the career he believes in so strongly. The other entries in the trilogy are Veronika Voss and The Marriage of Maria Braun. ~ Matthew Tobey, All Movie Guide

German filmmaker Margarethe von Trotta directs the war drama Rosenstrasse, based on the plight of "mixed marriages" between Jewish men and non-Jewish women during the Holocaust. In contemporary New York, Jewish matriarch Ruth (Jutta Lampe) practices Orthodox mourning traditions for her late husband, to the dismay of her daughter Hannah (Maria Schrader). At the wake, Ruth's cousin Rachel (Carola Regnier) tells Hannah some family secrets that send curious Hannah over to Berlin. She searches out 90-year-old Lena Fischer (Doris Schade), who cared for Ruth during WWII. Flashbacks recall the events of 1943,when Jewish husbands were rounded up and kept in a house on a street called Rosenstrasse. Lena (played by Katja Riemann as a young woman) joins a group of other wives for a week-long protest, where she meets an abandoned seven-year-old named Ruth (played by Svea Lohde as a girl). Rosenstrasse was shown in competition at the 2003 Venice International Film Festival. ~ Andrea LeVasseur, All Movie Guide