The Nasty Girl (4½ Stars)

This film is based on the true story of Anna Rosmus from Passau. Although it keeps close to the details of Anna's autobiography, the names of the characters and the places are changed. This was a deliberate decision by director Michael Verhoeven, because he wanted to show that any town in Germany could be guilty of the same crimes; the difference is that in other towns no young person was nasty enough to stand up and expose the sins of her townspeople.

And so the film tells the story of Sonja Wegmus in the Bavarian town Pfilzing in the late 1960's and early 1970's. The film starts by showing the pressures on a modern young girl growing up in a strongly religious environment. She excels in her convent school, partly due to the nuns passing her the exam questions in advance as a reward for her uncle's generous donations to the school. She is then asked to write an essay entitled "My town in the Third Reich". She had heard so much about the church resisting Hitler, so she was surprised that when she went to interview the town's church and political leaders she was given no exact details. On the contrary, her attempts to access the town's archives were forbidden. She is unable to finish the essay while at school, but the topic occupies her for years, and her investigations slowly reveal that the church is denying that it had collaborated with the Nazis.

A thoroughly enjoyable film. The English DVD cover shown above claims it is a comedy, but the serious elements heavily outweigh the film's few comic moments.