Black comedy about a lucrative business. Grandmother, mother and daughter live together in a love-hate-relationship and run their business with divided responsibilities: via marriage ads they are looking for candidates. It’s the daughter that gets dressed and styled according to the new mission: no matter if vamp or tree-hugger she twists the men around her little finger until they clear their accounts from all the savings. The money ends up in coffee tins stored in grandma’s fridge. But where do the men end up when they discover the secret of the trio?

At the Paris Theater, an uncommonly engrossing and wise new German movie, "A Free Woman," records the losing battle a divorced woman in her thirties fights in Munich to attain belated self-fulfillment. The die is cast in a briskly impersonal society geared to male dominance and early training for career women. This attractive, capable young woman, needing love and encouragement, determinedly sidesteps her former slot of housewife, studies voice and dance, takes on subordinate jobs and painfully maneuvers with her former husband (a cold fish who shrewdly remarries) for child custody.
All this is quietly and beautifully projected by an unobtrusive camera and stunningly personified by the feeling, low-key performance of Margarethe von Trotta in the central role. The blond star also happens to be the wife of the gifted director, Volker Schlondorff, as well as his co-screen writer.
They and the other performers and contributors have forged a fine, thoughtful and stimulating film that observantly mirrors a human condition, the traditional subordination of women with truthful, biting irony. It would be hard to find a more persuasive and appealing proponent of feminism than Mrs. Schlondorff.