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COPYRIGHT 2006 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
The new German movie "Sophie Scholl: The Final Days" is as plain as its title. The film follows the last six days in the life of Scholl (Julia Jentsch), who, with her brother, Hans (Fabian Hinrichs), and a friend, Christoph Probst (Florian Stetter), was executed by the Nazis in 1943. All three were members of the White Rose, a student resistance movement at Munich University. Sophie went there in May of 1942 to study biology and philosophy; Hans, a medical student, had enrolled in 1939. Both were ardent Christians. Early in the film, they take a suitcase of leaflets protesting Hitler's regime and the prolongation of the war to the Munich campus and leave them outside the lecture halls, to be picked up by students. One pile sits on a high balustrade; without warning, Sophie sweeps it into the air, so that the words of the White Rose sail down through the stairwell like snow.
That is almost the only moment of wildness in Marc Rothemund's film. The rest of it is unadorned, controlled, and workaday. There are no gunfights, no whippings or bone-breaks (none that we see firsthand, at any rate), and, from Sophie, little more than a single howl of distress. We hear sporadic, thriller-like thuds of music, but the bulk of the film pursues a steady beat. Sophie is arrested, driven to Gestapo headquarters, and interrogated, over three days, by an investigator named Robert Mohr (Alexander Held). At first, she denies all...
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