What makes martyrdom heroic rather than merely headstrong?
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Entrants submitted to the Academy for the Best Foreign Film category never fail to fascinate, in part because they often amount to public-relations efforts for their participating
governments-a glimpse into how each nation wants to view itself. When France, for example, submits the saccharine feel-good bonhomie of
Joyeux Noël
rather than the discomfiting, bourgeoise-threatening
Caché
, it's clear that her citizenry (or at least her film producers) aren't yet quite ready
to end the political whitewashing and cop to France's history of racism and deportation. By contrast, Germany's 2005 entrant is a courageously open and genuinely conscience-clearing artifact; no mere salve,
Sophie Scholl: Die letzten Tage
delivers a swift, workmanlike narrative of the last six days in the life of the young resistance worker. Now regarded as a heroine in a reunited Germany she would very much have admired, Scholl was only 21 when she was sentenced to the guillotine. She and her brother Hans were caught distributing anti-Nazi Party leaflets at their university in Munich, and the NSDAP wasted no time in making a very public, very discouraging example of
the Scholls. Eventually, all half-dozen founding members of the resistance group known as the White Rose were executed, thus at least nominally silencing its efforts. While there is another film of high caliber (1982's
Die Weiße Rose
) about the dissident student organization, Breinersdorfer and Rothemund had access to materials not previously available: police records and court transcripts concealed in East German archives until 1990. As a result, their novel approach has been to recreate an almost real-time sequence of scenes, dialogue-heavy, pressured and nerve-wracking.
Initially, Scholl (Julia Jentsch, in a star-making performance of contained obduracy) outargues her Gestapo interrogator, Robert Mohr (Gerald Alexander Held). The frustrated Mohr has given up and is one signature away from releasing her when her brother Hans (Fabian Hinrichs) confesses; Sophie then joins him in a blanket admission that she hopes will spare their comrades. "We did it all, my brother and I," she states repeatedly, her pale, calm face juxtaposed with Mohr's
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disbelieving one. That same calm dignity eventually wins over her inquisitor, who makes available an escape route, subtly urging her to avoid the death penalty by pretending she was only a fellow traveler and ignorant of the content of the leaflets. Sophie refuses.
Over the intensifying course of these interrogation scenes, the film's dramatic precursor emerges: Anouilh's
Antigone
, with first Mohr and then the presiding judge of the "People's Court" in the Creon-as-collaborator role. Scholl is fully as intransigent as her classical antecedent, and argues so cogently during her show trial that even the spectating gallery of Nazi officials murmurs with approval. But her youthful idealism is also so untainted with any Realpolitik that it's hard to position her completely as a fully realized political adult. Never mind; as Sontag says in her essay on Weil, "No one who loves life would wish to imitate her dedication to martyrdom nor would wish it for...anyone else whom he loves. Yet so far as we love seriousness, as well as life, we are moved by it, nourished by it." For a cinema still washing its hands of
Riefenstahl
-
Sophie Scholl
doesn't rank with the works of, say, Herzog, Fassbinder or Winders-it's a crucial piece of revisionism in the aesthetic history of a country once brought from Bayreuth to Birkenau within a single generation.
