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A reliable jest, Twain's "Concerning a Frightful Assassination that was never Consummated," say, seized to paint West Germany's reactionary panic in the wake of the Baader-Meinhof Group. "Too square and too shy," the eponymous housekeeper (Angela Winkler) who nevertheless enjoys a one-night stand with a dashing fugitive (Jürgen Prochnow). A thief and deserter but a perilous radical in the eyes of the police, the lady's apartment is raided, the Komissar (Mario Adorf) leads the punitive interrogation. Yellow journalism has its part to play, the jauntily amoral tabloid reporter (Dieter Laser) fabricates so much libelous dirt that the dull divorcee formerly nicknamed "The Nun" is swiftly viewed as a terrorist's whore. "Amazing how people find it hard to make a distinction between private and business life." Volker Schlöndorff's social-realist mise en scène and Margarethe von Trotta's sensitivity to thorny feminine psyches comprise the cautionary satire, an outraged snapshot of a young democracy all too easily slipping into old totalitarianism. "What is my crime," the heroine possibly answers her own question by not apologizing for her affairs before chauvinistic scrutiny. (Her cagy poise is sustained until tragic news cracks it on the bench outside the hospital.) Carnival time, the sham sheik at the costume bash is part of the surveillance, the ruthless snoop's own masquerade grants him access to the dying materfamilias. "You're headline news, you gotta exploit that," the newspaper in the gutter is an image from LeRoy's Five Star Final. The worm turns, the bitter punchline is a martyr's funeral for the press skunk, "neither intentional nor accidental but unavoidable." Schepisi essays an Outback echo in A Cry in the Dark. With Heinz Bennent, Hannelore Hoger, Rolf Becker, Harald Kuhlmann, Herbert Fux, Regine Lutz, Werner Eichhorn, and Karl-Heinz Vosgerau.
--- Fernando F. Croce |