TeenzTen An action-packed slog

Janae Milner Easily the biggest piece of Right wing non sense propaganda I ever saw.

Ariella Broughton It is neither dumb nor smart enough to be fun, and spends way too much time with its boring human characters.

Lachlan Coulson This is a gorgeous movie made by a gorgeous spirit.

bigverybadtom A young woman has come to Switzerland from Bosnia, and gets a job at a cafeteria run by a joyless martinet woman from that region, and another woman from that region is a coworker. Friends and relatives of the latter two women are also in the mix, while the young woman dances in clubs and has various lovers. She seems happy compared to the two glum older women-but she has seen the then-recent war in her country and has her own dark secrets which are revealed.The young woman tries and succeeds in bringing happiness to the cafeteria owner, but much of the movie is confusing, and was probably not meant for a non-European audience who probably would understand the protagonists' situation better. The movie just didn't cut it for me.

hasosch This many times awarded Swiss movie was produced by "Dschoint Ventr", an innovative Swiss film organization that is eager to distribute Swiss movies world wide. Fact is that Swiss movies are almost unknown in the US. In Switzerland, even many filmmakers are convinced that the topics are mostly too Swiss-specific and that great Swiss actors do not exist. So far for the present. For the past, Switzerland's greatest filmmaker, Kurt Früh (1915-79) is nowadays highly criticized for the alleged lack of disclosing the miserable social situation in the 50ies and 60ies and for having strongly used Italian Neo-Realist movies in order to make his own films. I assure you: both is not true. But nevertheless, not a single one of many hundreds of Swiss movies made between the silent time and den 70ies are available on international DVDs.Social topics have a long tradition in Swiss film. I just remember Kurt Früh's "Bäckerei Zürrer" where the conflicts between the early Italian immigrants and the indigenous population in Zürich are focused, or later especially in the movies of Kurt Gloor (1942-1998), f.ex. "Die Plötzliche Einsamkeit Des Konrad Steiner". Not to forget the movies of Alain Tanner, although his movies are all in French and thus form a minority in the rest of Switzerland. Also the present movie deals with immigrants, has a strong social vein, but unlike Früh's and Gloor's movie, you hardly hear Swiss German spoken. The three main actresses - famous artists imported from Ex-Yugoslawia as if there would not be enough talented Yugoslawian women familiar with the jobs shown in the movie - speak broken High German. From the rest of the cast only the two men - Andrea Zogg and the Spaniard Pablo Aguilar - are to be mentioned: Zogg is to see about four or five times for possibly 10 minutes, Aguilar for totally perhaps 2 minutes, and the rest of the crew for fragments of seconds. So, an interaction between the Yugoslawian immigrants and the Swiss population is out of the question and the movie is showing nothing else than how the three women get along, partly speaking Serbian/Croatian and partly broken German. In this movie, there is no trace of the wit, the humor, the tears-causing miseries and the whole empathy of Kurt Früh's movies, but nothing either of the socialist problems brought up in Kurt Gloor's films. This movie was produced in Switzerland, that is all. It could play anywhere in Europe, there is nothing Swiss-specific in this movie, except perhaps the five seconds when your hear Zurich's "Radio 24".Let me tell you one thing: As long as Kurt Früh's and Kurt Gloor's movies are not subtitled, engraved in international DVDs and available around the world, such mediocre and questionable films like "Das Fräulein" have no right to go around the world.

Chad Shiira Somewhere in Yugoslavia, Ruza(Mirjana Karajovich) left behind a man who didn't follow her younger self to Germany. Presumably, this is the man we see cutting branches off some denuded trees in the opening moments of "Das Fraulein", a film that conveys the same American celluloidal myth that women can't have it all. When the man's pruning shears cuts through one more indistinguishable branch(symbolic of women like Ruza who left their homeland), the screen abruptly goes black, and the first image we see after that severing, is an overhead shot of Ruza in bed, no longer a fraulein, but a spinster, childless to boot. Not satisfied with being a mere branch on some tree(a patriarchal metaphor), Ruza came to Germany, learned a new language, learned anew, period. But the modestly successful restuaranteer is not happy, far from it. That's the price a woman has to pay for choosing a career over family. Quite literally, the filmmaker shows that Ruza made her bed and now she must lie in it. The visage of this middle-aged woman tells the whole story; there is no love story, only her canteen, and the endless counting of money. Without variation, Ruza gets up every morning, takes the graffiti-filled elevator in her apartment complex, and walks to work in an industrial landscape dotted by warehouses and train tracks. Like clockwork, Mila(Ljubica Jovic, her cloyingly pleasant underling, waits for Ruza to unlock the front door. In her office, the only photograph we see is a lonely photograph of a younger Ruza posing with the restaurant facade, at the opening. This is what she sacrificed a husband and children for. Ruza has been married to this canteen for twenty-five years. Her unsmiling face indicates that it's time for a divorce.Meanwhile, a new has just arrived in town, a drifter from war-torn Sarajevo, a Bosnian. Ana(Marija Skaricic) survived the war, but will she survive leukaemia? After spending a night with friends, Ana wanders into Ruza's canteen and gets hired as a waitress. How long will it take for Ana to take over the canteen and inject a shot of "joie de vivre" into its zombie-like visitors, especially Ruza, who sees her former fraulein self in the new girl. Not long. At seventy-five minutes, the short running time mirror's Ana's sense of urgency to make every minute count. In one sequence, contrary to her co-worker's presumptions about their boss, Ruza has no objections to her birthday being celebrated. Ana's gambit pays off. As the older fraulein dances, the filmmaker uses exaggerated light to document the exact moment of Ruza's rejuvenation, as her hair flies around in the heightened shining that takes years off the restauranteer's leathery skin. Light is used to signify youth, as in another scene where Ruza and Ana run like schoolgirls through a downpour; the light catching the trajectory of the raindrops and the bounce of the women's hair. But Ana's own light is wavering, exemplified by the strobe light of the night clubs which Ruza's charge frequents. The intermittent dark, the micro-second pauses between the electric breathing is where Ana's destiny lies. But before the darkness shines permanently out of Ana's diseased body, she teaches Ruza how to let people into her life again. While "Das Fraulein" can be overly schematic, there's enough emotional truth between both frauleins that outweigh the cliché of the unmarried and childless woman who fixates on the younger woman as a daughter figure. Ana's surprisingly guarded side prevents the film from devolving into easy sentimentality. To the viewer's surprise, Ana has an emotional stuntedness which prevents her from getting close to people. Whereas Ruza was looking for somebody to love, Ana has an insularity about her that won't allow the child of war to love back.

Seamus2829 This German/Swiss co-production (filmed in Switzerland)is about three generations of women from Bosnia-Herzgovina. A young woman,living from day to day,a middle aged owner/manager of a restaurant & an older worker. It manages to nicely weave a trilogy of stories on how these women got to where they are (and why). I couldn't help notice that the movie seemed to be shot live on high definition video,rather than standard 35mm film stock,which gives it a certain look (mind you,I'm not beefing). Das Fraulein (or as it's being distributed in the U.S. as merely Fraulein) is a lovingly written/directed & acted film (video?) about 3 women trying to make do with their lives,and the hard knocks they've all been dealt with.