History with A Saucy Smile

By RICHARD CORLISS

THE NASTY GIRL Directed and Written by Michael Verhoeven

German films aren't funny. German films lack charm. German films avoid the Nazi past like the plague it was.

Be prepared to junk preconceptions with The Nasty Girl, Michael Verhoeven's exhilarating true-life adventure about a Nazi hunter in modern Bavaria.

A decade ago, Anja Rosmus was just another bright 20-year-old student in the town of Passau, where Hitler had lived and Eichmann was married. Anja was a good Catholic with no political ax to lodge in the town's guilty past. Then she decided to write an essay about Passau's resistance to the Nazis -- and was surprised to find the gentry amassed against her. Librarians blocked her research; the limit of confidentiality on documents was suspiciously extended from 30 years to 50. When her phone wasn't jangling with anonymous insults ("Jewish whore!"), neo-Nazi louts were tossing bombs into her bedroom. Official Passau saw her as das schreckliche Madchen, a troublemaker in a skirt. But Anja was determined not to be nice. It takes a nasty girl to go after the Nazi boys.

Verhoeven could have made a straightforward documentary on the subject; in fact he did, as a companion piece to The Nasty Girl. But in this movie he dresses fact up as fable. Passau becomes Pfilzing, and Anja Rosmus is now Sonja Rosenberger, a precocious sprite full of life and full of herself. The movie takes its spirit from Sonja; it is bold, nettlesome and great fun.

Verhoeven zips through his tangled story with all the brio of Brecht on a sunny day; his style is comic, ironic, daringly distanced. The girlhood scenes are played for easygoing farce and shot in black and white. Then the film bursts into snapshot color when Sonja falls in love with her teacher (Robert Giggenbach). Her hometown's streets and churches are stylized back projections. The Nasty Girl moves like an eccentric dancer, ever shifting its pace and mood, never losing its poise.

Lena Stolze made her film debut nine years ago as a student opposing Hitler in Verhoeven's The White Rose. As Sonja she is greatly winning, and the film bathes in her saucy radiance. She whistles when Sonja is happy, and when the crusade finally turns her way, she can't repress an exuberant yodel. Sonja wants to be Joan of Arc, but she's really Nancy Drew, doggedly sleuthing until she cracks a dark mystery. She can tolerate everything -- the aged Reichmongers cloaked in propriety, the goons who threaten her children -- everything but acceptance. When the town finally acknowledges her achievements, she must push it away. Who wants to be embraced and embalmed by Bavarian burgher smugness? Not our nasty girl.

For Verhoeven, this chipper satire may be part autobiography; his father Paul directed movies -- operettas, mostly -- during the Nazi era. So The Nasty Girl has perhaps allowed a gifted filmmaker to shake and break the bones of a family skeleton as well as a national one. German moviegoers have taken The Nasty Girl as if it were good medicine; they have made it a big homeland hit. But to Americans, the dose will taste like sugar candy with magical nutrients. Rarely does a history lesson evoke a 95-minute smile. This one does.