Rosenstrasse

This might be described as a female variant of Schindler's List, although told on a far smaller scale (a list of two, actually) and--to be honest--with considerably less emotional impact. Based on an actual incident that occurred in Berlin in mid-1943, when the tide of war had already turned against Germany, Rosenstrasse revolves around a pair of Jewish husbands of Aryan wives, who were long protected thanks to marital status, but ultimately rounded up for deportation in one of the last gasps of the Final Solution, spurring their spouses--in a rare display of public opposition to the Nazi regime--to demonstrate (successfully) for their release. The handsomely mounted film is told from the perspective of one of the women, Lena Fischer (Katja Riemann), a daughter of the old aristocracy, who not only works to save her husband but simultaneously takes in a young Jewish girl whose mother has also been arrested. But while the story is the stuff of powerful drama, writer-director Margarethe von Trotta stages it so decorously and at such a deliberate pace that the film is sapped of tension and suspense. Moreover, the decision to relate the story in a series of flashbacks recalled by the now-elderly Lena (Doris Schade) under the gentle questioning of the daughter of the girl whose life she saved, results in constant cutting between 1943 and the present, ultimately diluting the story's power. Among films about the horrors of the Holocaust, Rosenstrasse falls resolutely in the middle of the road. Optional. (F. Swietek)