The Legend of Paul and Paula

If you want to get the feel of life in East Germany and of life in the 70s, this is your film. It is critical of the socialist system (national socialism ended in 1945, afterwards there was no Nazi-propaganda anywhere anymore, especially not in the East! Sorry, but another reviewer got this wrong), offers a romantic story and good acting by well-known actors. It is still cult in Berlin, where you can regularly see in the cinema. It kicked off the wave of east-German nostalgia. The film was so successful that today you can still see references to it in other films (eg. "Sonnenallee") and that the city decided to name a path along a lake "Paul und Paula Ufer" with a Paul und Paula bench to sit on. Also the soundtrack is worth listening to (especially the lyrics) and marked the beginning of the Puhdys'huge career.

This picture, which has been shown in East Germany for only a week until political censors understood its impact on the people, is a very realistic East German view of life in post war East Berlin. It's mainly about the romance of Paul, a privileged but unhappy secret service agent, and Paula, an underprivileged and single girl with children. Since it is one of the very few movies which portraits honest details of real life in East Berlin at that time, it now serves as a reminder of emotions and feelings for a lot of East Germans. Despite the heavy use of symbolism (pretty old houses are blown away for the construction of uniform socialist buildings) it still doesn't draw a too pessimistic picture and leaves space for dreams and hope. I really love this movie, and I would recommend it to anyone who wants to catch a glimpse idea of how life was at that time in a socialistic system. The film is available with English subtitles which gives foreigners the chance to understand it, too.

This is a film from the time when you only saw Trabant (GDR-made) and Volga (Soviet-made) cars on the streets. It is a sad love story, set among the ruins of old German houses and the new blocks of socialism. In the soundtrack we hear some songs by the band from DDR Die Puhdys, unfortunately not the best from their repertoire, actually some very bad, they having some really excellent ones, being the most valuable rock band in communist Germany. For a film made in that period, when in countries like GDR, Poland, Romania, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Albania the films were nothing but communist propaganda, this film is a real exception, being very libertine, something inexplicable how it got away of the fierce censorship of the regime. In Yugoslavia the situation was different, they were much freer. And, there were bolder films in Hungary, Poland, Romania, but they were banned soon after release or scenes were cut. Angelica Domröse plays a role full of courage, totally unconventional for the politics behind the iron curtain. Scenes of sex and alcohol consumption could not be seen in those films of communist countries where everyone had to appear happy, without problems, living a wonderful life, in a perfect society, where children were brought by storks, not being the fruit of a sexual act between a man and a woman.

Heiner Carow's "Die Legende von Paul und Paula" is the first GDR film I've watched which centered on a woman and her development as an individual, which was new to DEFA within that period of time. "Die Legende..." is different from other films made before it since the story was about a woman who seeks for self-fulfillment and follows her heart in spite of the rigidity of societal norms.

In this film, Paula is the epitome of what women were mostly portrayed as in the 1970s: emotional rather than rational.

Paula is a quirk of a character. She wears her heart on her sleeve and cares not one bit what happens as long as she is happy. She seems a bit over the edge at some points in the film, though. As if she were about to break down at a moment's notice. Her character is intense and Angelica Dumrose fully consummates the part.

"Die Legende von Paul und Paula" (1973), co-written and directed by Heiner Carow, is a famous film in Germany. The story seems tame enough now--a young woman is dissatisfied with her life and takes active steps to improve it.

Angelica Domröse plays Paula, a single mother who has a dead-end job and no social life. Winfried Glatzeder portrays Paul, who is unhappily married and is drawn to the free-spirited Paula. (Glatzeder has been called East Germany's Jean-Paul Belmondo. He didn't look much like Belmondo, and wouldn't have struck me as leading man material. However, I don't know enough about East German cinema to be aware of his competition.)

I've been told that the reason for this film's popularity in East Germany was because it contained subtle criticism of the regime, as well as depicting some PG-13 sex. I know East German films were subject to strict censorship, and, as in any similar regime, directors inserted criticisms in ways that were necessarily very indirect and symbolic.

The problem is that this movie only works if you can think of how you would have viewed it in East Berlin in 1973. I don't believe it's strong enough to succeed on its own merits in 2006.