A FREE WOMAN
Directed by VOLKER SCHLONDORFF
Screenplay by VOLKER SCHLONDORFF and MARGARETHE VON TROTTA
In the best and the truest sense, this is a woman's picture. Angry and rueful, it is an attempt to get at some of the political, legal and social complications that tie women down, humble them and sometimes defeat them. Heavily naturalistic in mode, the film makes good and pertinent drama out of emotional suffocation.
Elisabeth is quite an ordinary young woman: pretty, smart and young enough to feel stirrings of ambition. As the movie begins, she has just been divorced from her husband (Friedhelm Ptok), a stalwartly selfish book editor. Her departure was caused partly by her own restlessness and partly by her husband's view of woman's estate as somewhere just above serfdom. He retains custody of their young son. For Elisabeth to have any chance to win her child back, she must prove to the German court that she leads "a moral life."
At first, Elisabeth is elated by the possibilities of independence. But if marriage to her husband was crippling, she is helpless outside it. She moves in with a pregnant friend, lives modestly, looks for work, has an intermittent affair with an engineer (Martin Luttge). She gets a series of routine jobs (sales assistant, secretary, typist, guide) and tries to give modest shape to childhood dreams of becoming a musical-comedy actress by taking singing and dancing lessons.
A promising position in an art gallery turns into a prolonged pass from her porcine boss, who chats her up by quoting Reich on the sexual revolution. Her husband announces plans for remarriage, Elisabeth suspects, just to bolster his claim to custody of their son. Under the accumulated weight of legal problems and the meager life she has managed to make for herself, she finally gives in and falls into the arms of the engineer. He is a decent sort who suggests they marry. The security of marriage, he points out, will make everything easier for her again. She may even get her son back.
A Free Woman makes its point with bitter force: only a return to the lulling assurances of traditional female roles will allow a woman to function at all. "Every woman is replaceable!" shouts Elisabeth's husband, and the movie is careful to show how and why this has come to be so. On occasion it is too eager about its cataloguing of injustices and outrages. A brief moment when Elisabeth rejects a job as an apprentice programmer by saying "Feeding computers? I've done enough feeding in my life," is stronger, for example, than a long scene in a museum where an art historian lectures on sexism in painting through the ages.
The movie is a collaboration between the director and his wife Margarethe von Trotta, who worked on the screenplay and who appears as Elisabeth, a performance of wonderfully explicit compassion. Trotta is able to seize on a well-observed moment, embellish it and build on it without ever becoming extravagant or false. Her uncommon artistry gives A Free Woman a strong and generative center. ∎ Jay Cocks