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Screening at Berlinale: Markus Schleinzer’s ‘Rose’

Sandra Hüller stars in this riveting, possibly transgender historical drama in a role that won her a second Silver Bear.

Markus Schleinzer’s Rose, an exceptional historical fiction, doesn’t so much transport you to the past as it brings you to the edge of the translucent curtain that often obfuscates history from view. The stark monochrome drama follows a 17th-century woman in the guise of a man—such is the nomenclature used by the characters and the gentle narrator (Marisa Growaldt)—but its underlying emotional mechanics are distinctly queer. This brings to the fore the question of who and what the movie is really about, but that vital dilemma is nestled within the larger, more pressing, impeccably performed story of a person whose precarious freedom rests on a knife’s edge, resulting in Sandra Hüller being awarded the Berlinale’s Silver Bear for Best Lead Performance—her second time winning the trophy since Requiem in 2006.

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Somewhere in Germany during the Thirty Years’ War, a facially scarred soldier, referred to in voiceover only as Rose (Hüller), inherits farmland by impersonating a fallen comrade and establishes a homestead—a luxury only afforded to men. The narration sets the story’s parameters: that of a woman pretending to be a man as she tries to live free from the confines of structural misogyny. History is filled with women donning trousers to escape patriarchal norms, but also with likely transgender men who may have been conferred this designation in times and places where no such language for trans-ness existed. But whichever way a modern audience might interpret this story, its telling aligns—often intentionally—with that of the conservative Protestant villagers from whom Rose must hide the nature of her identity.

This isn’t........

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