The Nasty Girl
                Reviewed by Linda Lopez McAlister
            For The Women's Show, WMNF-FM, Tampa, FL

     I've just seen a really remarkable film by German filmmaker
Michael Verhoven--called, somewhat inaccurately in English, "The
Nasty Girl."  A closer translation would be the horrible or
terrible or perhaps better yet the terrifying girl, because it is
terror that she strikes in the hearts of her fellow citizens of
Pfiltzling when she starts writing an essay entitled "My Hometown
During the Third Reich." The film's chilling depiction of how
patriarchal institutions and the powerful individuals who control
them will use any means to neutralize serious threats against
them will also strike terror in the hearts of feminists and
others who work for radical change.

    Oddly enough this is a film that has been touted in ads as a
comedy.  That's either a misunderstanding or a misrepresentation
of the film, but one which, at first, the film invites. It
starts out with a seemingly happy and successful young woman
narrating, in flashback, a rather good-natured, ironic, satire of
life in a conservative, Catholic, small Bavarian city in the
1950s and '60s when our heroine was a bright and a very good
young girl; it pokes fun at the hypocrisy that won't allow a
pregnant married woman to teach high school students, for fear
they would "ask questions" while sex is the major preoccupation
of most of her students not to mention the up-standing, up tight
adult population.

    The films turns much more serious, however, when Sonja
(played by Lena Stoltze) begins to ask questions of a different
sort for her essay which, she assumes, will show how the Church
in her town heroically resisted the Nazis.

   Only a few people will talk to her and nearly everybody
scapegoats the former Mayor as the only real Nazi.  But a few
people drop hints of a cover up.  So some people are doubtless
relived when she misses the essay deadline, and, distracted by
graduation, romance, marriage and young children, drops the
project--for several years.  She goes back to it in a much more
mature fashion, however, when she enrolls at the university to
study history with one of the most respected figures in the town,
who also publishes the local newspaper. In her research she
discovers an incident in which two unidentified priests had
denounced a Jewish merchant as an enemy of the Reich and sent him
to a death camp. To find out who they were she needs access to
the town archives and runs into a bureaucratic stone wall, even
after winning several law suits to gain access. By this time
neo-Nazi hate groups and many of the "good citizens" of this
ever-so-gemutlich little town are leaving hate messages and
threats on her and her family's lives on her answering machine,
not to mention heaving bombs through her window.

     This is the only film I have ever seen in which a woman is
depicted as being single-mindedly obsessed by the pursuit of the
truth. That's a discourse that has always been reserved for the
male hero.  Several times Sonya is almost diverted from her quest
by the temptations society dangles in front of women to keep us
in our places.  Her husband does the prudent thing and moves
away, but though she loves him she does not follow him.  She
wrestles with the fact that she's exposing her kids to real life-
threatening danger, but she presses on.  She's afraid for her own
life and longs to live to a ripe old age, but still she
continues.  The most tempting snare of all comes when the town
stops trying to destroy her and instead tries to coopt her by
doing an about face and honoring her as it's fearless heroine.
She almost buys it, but then, in a scene that's perhaps unique in
film history, as she is being immortalized--that is, immobilized-
-at the dedication of a statue in her honor, she realizes it's
just another way of silencing her and she cuts loose with a
tirade that will make feminist hearts swell with pride.  Yet that
ringing discourse of resistance is short-lived as we see her, in
the final sequence, fleeing with her daughter to the tree which
has frequently been her solace, on the outskirts of town.  The
look in her eyes is one of terror.  She knows, perhaps, that her
outburst of truth-telling, however empowering it might have been,
gives the patriarchy yet another tool to use against her. Now
they can say she is mad. See this film. It speaks truths,
terrible, terrible truths.

        For the WMNF Women's Show this is Linda Lopez McAlister
on Women and Film.