Directed by Volker Schloendorff
35 MM, Feb. 19 - March 4

While the rest of West Germany gets on with reaping the fruits of the economic miracle that made it a capitalist powerhouse, Rita Vogt and her comrades rob banks and play revolution in the name of a socialist future. On the run from the law, they end up in East Germany. Rita chooses to stay in the workers’ paradise and is assigned a new identity by the Stasi. But the past is constantly on her tail and once the Wall comes down, it looks like there’s nowhere left to hide.

The film’s title in German means "the silence after the shooting," and aptly captures the contrast between Rita’s lawless and chaotic West German life and her attempts to become a quiet, model East German citizen. All the strings of her various "legends" are in the hands of Stasi officer Erwin, who changes her name, appearance, job and home as the need arises. Erwin does a brutally conscientious job, arresting people who know too much, but his fixing and patching isn't enough when the whole country is cracking apart.

Schloendorff's film is conceived as a drama – the personal tragedy of a misled young idealist – but this very idealism also lends it an unwitting comic aspect. Bibiana Beglau plays Rita with a convincing degree of commitment to, and belief in, her cause. But there is nevertheless something a little far-fetched in this group of German terrorists tearing their hair out over ideological dilemmas in a Paris apartment. It's hard at moments to take it seriously and remember that in the 1970s, politics was a bit like crack for some people, getting them hooked and turning them aggressive.

The East German part of the story also has its amusing moments. It sounds funny now to hear Germans saying such typically socialist lines as "they’re selling Bulgarian tomatoes, today." East Germany comes across as a dreary, sleepy place, out of the range of the ripples coming from change in Moscow. About the only person who seems to feel any regret as East Germany collapses is Rita. Even though she’s become aware of the flaws in the system, she can’t help but defend her ideals one last time in front of her colleagues at work. But the only reaction is incomprehension and suspicion. She stands alone making a funeral speech for a system everyone else seems happy to bury.

Loneliness follows her throughout her East German odyssey. She meets people: first, the confused but loyal Tatyana, then Jochen, who wants to marry her and take her to Moscow, where he’s set to do research. But her concealed past, rather than giving her a chance to start afresh, turns out to be a sort of permanent and invisible solitary confinement, cutting her off from any real attachments to others.

In the end, everyone has to save himself. The once all-powerful Stasi is reduced to bundles of archives to be disposed of, men winding up their dirty work and turning in their guns amid the realization that all their effort was for nothing.

"But, terrorists are idiots who kill innocent people," a shocked Jochen says to Rita at one point in the film.

"Yes, I did all that," Rita replies.

Ultimately, however, the viewer ends up wanting to give Rita another chance even if objectively, she deserves to pay for her idiocy and the innocent lives she’s taken. Schloendorff succeeds in painting the nuances of her character and drawing a certain sympathy for her. But the feeling that it was all such a waste is never far away. Though the years the story portrays are not really so distant from us, so much has changed since then that the film has a period-piece feel and Rita the German terrorist is on her way to becoming a legend in herself – a detail of what is already last century’s history.