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.

An early work from the filmmaker behind THE TIN DRUM with an intriguing Hans Christian Anderson-style fairy tale aesthetic and voice over narration. SUDDEN WEALTH is a despairing chronicle of a group of starving peasants who finally seize governmental wealth like a dysfunctional group of Robin Hood's Merry Men, only to be betrayed by their inescapable selves and systematically dehumanized (think bucolic Orwell) and reprogrammed by what we'll put under the rubric of God and Country. Extremely striking compositions at times. Only one man (who bears a passing resemblance to a young John Cleese, incidentally) refuses to go gentle into that good night. The last scene is reminiscent of the endings in both Kubrick's PATHS OF GLORY and THE CRUCIBLE with Day-Lewis, yet all even more chilling with its alienating suddenly reappearing voice-over. SUDDEN WEALTH benefits from an especially strong second half with fuller characterization that makes it come alive as a whole for Schlondorff, whose film's evinces extremely striking compositions at times with stationary camera. Especially recommended for those interested in the New German Cinema.