Laikals The greatest movie ever made..!

ShangLuda Admirable film.

Lollivan It's the kind of movie you'll want to see a second time with someone who hasn't seen it yet, to remember what it was like to watch it for the first time.

pointyfilippa The movie runs out of plot and jokes well before the end of a two-hour running time, long for a light comedy.

John Peters The Legend of Rita, this movie's English-language title, is not as hokey as it initially sounds. "Legend" was the term used by the East German Secret Police (the Stazi) for the cover stories created to disguise the identities of West German terrorists who had been secretly granted asylum in the East. The German title, Die Stille nach dem Schuss (literally The Stillness after Rapid Action), is a German phrase that sounds fine in its original language but is too abstract for colloquial translation of a film that is, among other things, an effective thriller."Schuss" in the original title refers to the bank robberies and killings shown at the beginning of the film and "Stille" to the subsequent life, east of the Berlin Wall, of Rita Vogt, a member of a terrorist cell determined to change the world by violent action. She is a fictitious character, a composite of several real people. Eleven such individuals from West Germany, did, in fact, find refuge in the East, but only on condition that they live peacefully as ordinary workers and have no contact with one another. Director Volker Schlöndorff says, in a lengthy audio commentary that accompanies silent images from the film on its Kino Video DVD, that "the episodes are authentic but the characters are somewhat fictitious." The "somewhat fictitious" Rita is assigned two identities during her years in East Germany. Initially, she works in a textile factory and develops a passionate friendship with an East German woman. Then, following her identification by another worker, she is given a new legend and becomes a child care worker for a state agency. In this identity, she falls in love with an engineer who has been assigned to work for five years in Moscow. They want to marry and have children but the Stazi doesn't want her going to Moscow out of fear of discovery by the Soviets. Rita violates her orders from the Stazi and reveals her identify to her lover. His astonishment and rejection make their separation easier.Things change for Rita with the fall of the Berlin Wall and approaching German reunification. She finds herself, alone among her workplace associates, regretting the demise of a country that, however imperfectly, tried to make human relationships more important than economic success. Once again, she is a fugitive terrorist. Preferring tragedy to capture or a life in hiding, she steals a policeman's motorcycle, drives it through a border post, and is shot and killed by a guard.The reason for East Germany's granting of asylum to West German terrorists is not entirely clear, either in the film or in real life. The closest the film comes to an explanation occurs when the members of the Red Army cell meet with their Stazi minder for a bratwurst barbecue at a pleasant rural villa. East Germany has signed the Helsinki Convention against harboring terrorists and has no interest in supporting what Lenin called "infantile Leftism." Cell members are given a choice of transportation to a third world country or remaining in East Germany. Individuals make different choices and kiss one another good bye. A Stazi executive at the barbecue suggests that a longing for lost revolutionary romanticism underlies the East Germany policy.Another aspect of the film is its portrayal of everyday life in East Germany. It does this more completely than either Good Bye Lenin (2003) or The Lives of Others (2006) although these are, in many respects, excellent movies. To Western eyes, the results are surprising. Not everything is East Germany is drab and gray. The Stazi is ubiquitous but not omnipotent. Rita wears a sexy bikini when supervising children at a Baltic beach and no one thinks anything of it. People have a variety of opinions about many different subjects. According to Schlöndorff's commentary, West German viewers found the portrayal of East German life insufficiently harsh but former Easterners thought it exceptionally accurate.I seldom give movies 10 ratings but, for The Legend of Rita, I can find nothing that should have been done differently. Both Schlöndorff and Wolfgang Kohlhaase are superb scriptwriters. Bibiana Beglau plays Rita and Martin Wuttke is Erwin Hull, Rita's sympathetic Stazi minder. All of the actors are excellent. The cinematography and editing are consistently tight and competent. From what I can see, the film has no weak links. I had not previously heard of it and got its DVD, almost by accident, from a public library. Wonderful discoveries are possible.

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.

psteele Schlondorff has no strong sense of what to make of his terrorist characters. Rita is idealistic but her personal life is pulled in rather conventional bourgeois directions. The film points to the paradox of idealistic murder and suggests that society has no ability to appreciate the complexity of such a character, but why should it when even a work of art like this film is unable to explore what's inside its title character. A muddled film about a muddled time.

wwwhpcom What the director has done with this picture is make the history of the DDR (Deutche Demokratishe Republik - The German Democratic Republic)with the protagonist a stand-in for the state. Certainly she is the little orphan Annie of Marxism-Leninism, and we see the DDR though her eyes (which may explain why the sets are so clean.) In a possible defence of her radicalism, may I say that the Bundesrepublik Deutchland(West Germany)was very much a conservative, yet apolitical state for the first 20 years of it's existence. The WW II generation was silent, the (initally) radical labor unions of 1946 were tamped down with help from the CIA and the AFL-CIO. German youth was ambivalent towards America and the West because of the occupation troops and the cheasy bar culture they brought with them. You can't live in the `50's forever, and when the 1960's wafted in, people like Rita were silently raging for change. Unfortunately for her, Mao's dictum of "political power grows from the barrel of a gun" was more appealing than other forms of protest or makig a counterculture. The rest is the plot.The Stasi paper-shredding scene near the end actually happened; the BDR is still sorting the fragments. And yes, Trabants were that cheap.