Rosa Luxemburg

Rosa Luxemburg has a lot going for her when it comes to the myth factory: female, lame, Polish, internationalist, pacifist, revolutionary, imprisoned on nine separate occasions, a leader of the Spartacists in their brief revolutionary success in postwar Germany, and cruelly murdered in 1919. This film won awards at Cannes and Berlin, two for Sukowa in the title role; and utterly splendid she is too, conveying a delicate mixture of strength and vulnerability. But though the film avoids many of the pitfalls of the Hello Mozart, Hello Salieri school of biopic, it still falls badly between the two stools of personal chronicle and politico-historical analysis, despite the intriguing use of archive newsreel footage, and the sterling contributions of Sander (as Karl Liebknecht) and Olbrychski (Leo Jogiches).