MusicChat
It's complicated... I really like the directing, acting and writing but, there are issues with the way it's shot that I just can't deny. As much as I love the storytelling and the fantastic performance but, there are also certain scenes that didn't need to exist.
FilmCriticLalitRao
The Legend of Rita is about the lives of some young terrorists from West Germany who dreamed of making radical changes in the lives of people using violent means. It describes the tumultuous lives of these people especially their stay in East Germany by focusing on a particular person who is the film's protagonist. Although the film's pace is fast, it fails to do much justice to the topic it intended to portray. As events in the life of a terrorist are shown in a rapid succession without bothering to concentrate on one particular aspect, 'The Legend of Rita' takes the form of an entertainer as it distances itself too much from the radical stance viewed in hardcore political films. It appears that the director Volker Schlöndorff has sweetened his film to such a large extent that even East German secret service agents appear as if they were some kind of nice gentlemen with nothing but loads of goodness in their hearts. As a festival film, 'The legend of Rita' won some important prizes namely silver bear and best actress price shared by Bibiana Beglau and Nadja Uhl during Berlinale 2000. Finally, it is a nice film which can be watched with family and friends.
swillsqueal
The Red Army Faction (RAF) was a self-described, communist, anti- imperialist urban guerrilla organisation based in the Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany). The RAF had a theoretically superficial Marxist-Leninist set of politics similar to those of Weatherman in the USA and the Red Army Faction in Japan. These were young people, many of them college students, who felt both a guilt about and sympathy for Third World nationalist revolutions; revolutions they believed, were the vanguard of a world revolution which would eventually sweep the 'fascist imperialist' States away.Che Guevara captured what Schlöndorff is attempting to portray in his film concerning the mental spirit of these German student, revolutionary romantics when he reflected on his own audacity and political commitment: "At the risk of seeming ridiculous, let me say that the true revolutionary is guided by a great feeling of love. It is impossible to think of a genuine revolutionary lacking this quality... We must strive every day so that this love of living humanity will be transformed into actual deeds, into acts that serve as examples, as a moving force." Action and audacity were the Red Army Faction's (RAF) strong suit. "The Legend of Rita" (original German title "Die Stille nach dem Schuß" ) is set in the divided Germany of the 70s. Rita is a young fearless romantic in love with a left-wing revolutionary, one Andreas 'Andi' Klein, a guy who is more or less the leader of an RAF group which she is a part of. Their RAF group is armed, ruthless and robs banks to fund 'the revolution'. These revolutionaries naively explain their robberies in terms of 'anti- imperialist' politics : Yes, out loud, to customers as they clean out the capitalist bank vault and cash drawers, with weapons drawn.Adrenal rush and surprise hit one in this film from start to finish. From jail breaks to motorcycle chases, to life behind the Iron Curtain, the film comes at you again and again with images you've been brainwashed to feel uncomfortable with. (Caution viewers: you may feel a violation of your Hollywoodised sensibilities.) You'll also feel the kind of careless courage these young people of the RAF had, as they consciously faced death, even as they reached out for a better life-- actually,a better life for others, mostly. As many, many of the New Left, Rita and her fellow RAF members are motivated to take violent political action in order to assuage a deeply felt guilt about being born in First World privilege. They are more moralists than materialists--romantic poets ready to use murder as a political weapon. In the midst of all this direct, violent action, some of them change, become more hard hearted, mechanically calculating. Rita's boyfriend is one of them and when this happens, love dies. Rita is a lover first and a revolutionary second. In her heart of hearts, she wants to settle down, have kids, a husband, the whole modern suburban dream, albeit in a more egalitarian, 'anti- imperialist' society. Rita wants mutual love more than anything else and as she learns more about the duplicitous mendacity of the coldly calculating political apparatus in both the East and West, she comes to the realisation that political States are always ready to opportunistically sacrifice their oft repeated, propagandised moral goals and callously toss human lives on the scrapheap for political gain. As a result, she grows closer to the only person who ever measured up to her romantic expectations, an East German woman named, Tatjana.Volker Schlöndorff has directed a master portrait of a political situation, a time and a place which is quickly disappearing down the 'memory hole'. Not only are the West German RAF, with their Ton Stein Scherben albums and sneering hatred for bourgeois complacency critically and sympathetically examined; but the 'actually existing socialism' of the DDR of that era is laid bare as well. East Germany is portrayed realistically, down to the last idiosyncrasy, from the near empty roads, to the Radeberger Pilsner, to the workers' apartments in those large, multi- storied college dorm-like buildings in urban East Berlin. This portrait will disturb long held mainstream 'Time' magazine inspired conceptions of East Germany, some would say, 'with extreme prejudice'. Rest assured, the film's honesty extends across both sides of the East/West border. Far from revolutionary or socialist, most of the citizens of the DDR are portrayed as being quite conservative, endorsing whichever police are in charge of the political State. The point is hammered home at the end of the movie, when the fall of the Wall in 1989 is portrayed; a time when Rita and her audience are supposed to come to the realisation of just what die Stille nach dem Schuß entails.
jpfurner
'the legend of rita' is an unfortunately choice of title when compared to the German 'die stille nach dem schuss'. The film is about how members of small armed revolutionary groups come to terms with what remains of their lives ('die stille') between/after periods of action ('dem Schuss'), not principally about one person, let alone their 'legend', even if there is only one character who is continually present.Since the group in question hides out for a period in the ddr, a number of occasions arise in which the politics of armed guerillas and that of the ddr are compared, and both appear a long way off the kind of broad participatory socialism they are often mistakenly taken to aspire to. The exchanges between the main stasi officer and rita about the role of violence and the state are particularly priceless.
George Parker
"The Legend of Rita" follows the activities of a young female idealist who runs with a small band of second rate terrorists in West Germany just prior to the end of the Cold War, goes straight, and hides under assumed identities (the legend). A well crafted, technically good Euroflick, "...Rita", equally split between character and story, puts the audience in the awkward position of having to root for a terrorist with only a marginally interesting story to tell. Slightly above par, "...Rita" will appeal most to cinema buffs and those into Euroflicks.
