Das Blaue Licht

A majestic waterfall cascading down a rugged mountainside, a horse grazing in the clearing of a sun-dappled forest: cliché prose for cliché images, as Riefenstahl indulges her taste for wildly idealised Nature. She plays Junta, the outcast of the Dolomites, shunned by the locals as a witch, her only friends a boy goatherd and a visiting artist. She communes mystically with a crystal grotto, source of the Blue Light, associated with truth and purity. At least until the villagers desecrate it, prompting her to check out. Riefenstahl's affirmation of the occult has a certain morbid interest, but it's as a performer, posing leggily atop cloudswept crags, that she most compels attention - though a certain Thatcher-esque cast to her features is hard to rise above, once you've spotted it.