A Prima Donna of Passion

By RICHARD CORLISS

A LOVE IN GERMANY Directed by Andrzej Wajda

Screenplay by Boleslaw Michalek, Agnieszka Holland and Andrzej Wajda

Stani and Paulina are crazy for each other. He (Pirotr Lysak) is a young Polish prisoner of war, and she (Hanna Schygulla) is a middle-aged German housewife running her husband's grocery store while he goes off to fight for the Fuehrer, but propriety be damned--they can't and don't keep their hands to themselves. They neck furiously as a young customer enters the store. Stani squats behind the counter and strokes Paulina's thigh while foraging for another customer's potatoes. Everybody in town knows about them: Paulina's neurotic bookkeeper (Elisabeth Trissenaar), the snoop-exhibitionist next door (Marie-Christine Barrault), even Paulina's seven-year-old son. He discovers them flagrante delicto in the storeroom; Mama eyes him solemnly, closes the door and returns to her pleasure. "Me, beautiful?" Paulina remarks to Stani. "But I could be your mother." And Stani replies: "My mother is beautiful too." This is a suicidal passion that condemns the lovers with every caress, but they are oblivious to the consequences. Paulina visits Stani in the stable where he works, and their intensity literally frightens the horses.

The pot boils over nonstop in this superheated political romance; Andrzej Wajda sees to that. From his first features (the 1950s trilogy comprising A Generation, Kanaland Ashes and Diamonds) to the 1981 Man of Iron, an incendiary docudrama about the Solidarity movement, this Polish director has always made movies as if he believed that craft was an impediment to emotion and subtlety the last refuge of an artistic quisling. His hurtling, bullying camera captures characters in heat or dancing on the barricades taunting their Soviet godfathers. But it takes a strong subject not to be overwhelmed by Wajda's scenery-chewing style. Rolf Hochhuth's novel Eine Liebe in Deutschland offered that subject: the purging delirium of love set against the corruptive madness of Nazism.

Nazism was political tragedy that moved at the tempo of provincial farce, and that is how Wajda plays Stani's interrogation by SS Lieut. Mayer (Armin Mueller-Stahl) and his adjutant Schulze (Ralf Wolter). These "good Germans" find it almost impossible to "follow orders." They debate Stani's skin color (pink or rose?) and attempt to match Stani's eyes to a set of 20 glass eyeballs thoughtfully provided by the Gestapo. Finally they declare him "in better than good health--You're an Aryan! You can become a German." When Stani declines the honor, they rule he must be hanged by a fellow Pole, who will receive three cigarettes as reward. Through all the meticulous absurdities of the Nazi bureaucracy, these Klutz-en-jammer Kids tiptoe like hippos in a chorus line.

Schygulla, though, is a prima donna of passion. She learned her trade making 18 movies and TV films with the bold, relentless Wunderkind of German cinema, R.W. Fassbinder (Effi Briest, The Marriage of

Maria Braun), and in the past few years has worked with Jean-Luc Godard (Passion), Ettore Scola (La Nuit de Varennes) and Marco Ferreri (The Story ofPiera). By now Schygulla has perfected the bold gesture deftly applied. The grocery-door shutters snap down, or a window shade snaps up, and a thrill sizzles through her like lightning. In the interrogation room she gets a look at her cuckolded husband and quickly puts her fingers to her eyes, gouging out his presence. Her mouth arcs, her tongue flicks, her eyes blaze, her face is illuminated by the reckless glow of a true believer in the imperatives of Eros.

This is a dramatic vocabulary rooted in the operatic purity of silent-film making; Schygulla uses it to create, with each film, a new chapter in the emotional biography of the modern European woman. A Love in Germany reveals Schygulla as a superb, fearless actress and an international star ready to take Hollywood. Wake the town, tell the people. Frighten the horses, even. --By Richard Corliss