Reviews

First, this is a wonderful film. After watching it in the cinema-hall, I immediately ordered the book through internet: 'Sophie Scholl, Die Letzten Tage'. The acting was superb, the actors also very much looked like the persons they had to impersonate. The acting of Roland Freisler was precisely what that monster was like, in fact the film Freisler was much more mild than the real one. But there remains the baffling thing of the microphones being visible with regularity hanging above the scenes. It looked like a cutting or directing mistake. But I found in one of the reactions in this forum a more plausible explanation: a kind of Brechtian Verfremdung in order to show that either God or one's conscience is still listening even if the interrogations with the Gestapo were conducted in secret. Perhaps it also indicates that in the Third Reich everyone was overheard. Still, for me personally, this microphone could have remained invisible.

Otherwise the film is extremely well done. Every detail, as far as I could see on the screen, was from those times. I can also recommend the book, because it gives the pamphlets of the Weisse Rose and the Gestapo protocols of the interrogations. We were also surprised to learn that the Scholls were guillotined. The usual way, one would think, was to put the convict against the wall and have them shot with rifles. Or with a pistol (Standesamtgericht). What is most chilling in the film is the relative normalcy of everyday life under the Nationalsocialist cancer.

The film does not portray Jesus Christ as He historically must have been, something some later Gospel films have been trying. But Pasolini seems to have tried to portray the Jesus of the Gospel of St. Matthew as it must have been to the eyes of believing beholders. This story is as it has been, even if it is totally unhistorical. You feel you come very close to the real Jesus Christ, much closer than through other films. I know of a Hindu viewer who immediately felt that this was the real Jesus Christ. It helps that Pasolini made the film in black and white. It is very poetic in composition. But I also known of viewers who almost fell asleep after the first thirty minutes and were not interested in seeing the rest, even though they could follow the Italian. I find it a good thing Jesus speaks Italian and not Shakespearian English.