The Subjective Factor

Anni, the 'heroine' and thinly fictionalised director-surrogate, is a single mother who joins a Berlin commune, gets turned on to the utopian militancy of '68, then quickly converted to a figurehead of the emergent Women's Movement by the discovery that her male comrades are chauvinistic Schweine who affect macho trenchcoats and keep their socks on during sex. As the title implies, it's a defiantly and meanderingly personal film that often drags, then ends up by jumping abruptly from the first stirrings of feminism to 1980s sell-out (erstwhile anti-Nam demonstrators dining out at a chic Vietnamese eatery). Sander's modish theme is a suppressed woman's history, but with the heady radicalism under consideration now evaporated into the mists of history, the film emerges (presumably unintentionally) almost as a piece of period nostalgia.