Germany Pale Mother (Deutschland bleiche Mutter (1980

Director: - Helma Sanders-Brahms

Writer: - Helma Sanders-Brahms (writer)

	Eva Mattes	...	Lene
	Ernst Jacobi	...	Hans
	Elisabeth Stepanek	...	Hanne
	Angelika Thomas	...	Lydia
	Rainer Friedrichsen	...	Ulrich
	Gisela Stein	...	Aunt Ihmchen
	Fritz Lichtenhahn	...	Uncle Bertrand
	Anna Sanders	...	Anna

Helma Sanders-Brahms's ''Germany Pale Mother'' is narrated by a woman who says she is telling her parents' story, as well as her country's. Her parents' courtship began during the Nazis' rise to power, and it was, she says, ''perfectly normal, only it happened at this time, in this country.'' Their marriage was marked by long separations, as Hans (Ernst Jacobi) went off to fight in the war, and Helene (Eva Mattes) stayed home, raising her daughter and enduring almost every imaginable physical hardship.

As played by Miss Mattes, Helene is a thick, stolid, long-suffering creature. During the course of the film, she gives birth to a child during an air raid, survives the destruction of her home, is raped by American G.I.'s, has all her teeth removed, and develops a facial paralysis that is so disfiguring that she is forced to wear a black drape at the dinner table. As both a woman and as a metaphor for her country's hardships, Helene is a figure of formidable misery.

''Germany Pale Mother,'' which takes its title from Bertolt Brecht's 1933 poem and which will be playing at the Public Theater for another week, uses a peculiarly changeable style in presenting Helene's unhappy life. The slow, painful realism that characterizes most of the film is occasionally interrupted by more fanciful passages, such as the one in which Helene guides her tiny daughter Anna through the ruins of a Nazi crematorium, cheerfully telling the child a macabre fairy tale. Hans first spies Helene in a scene of similarly heightened tone, as he and a friend spend a beautiful spring day rowing on a river, and happen to watch as Helene is taunted by some Nazis. They let their dog bite her sweater and still Helene does not cry out. Her unusual perseverance is the quality that wins Hans's attention.

Miss Sanders-Brahms establishes virtually everything about her characters early in the film, and begins to repeat herself subsequently; there are, for instance, at least three different lengthy scenes depicting Hans's visit home on furlough, and Helene's unwillingness to have sex with him. ''Germany Pale Mother,'' which begins with a reading of Brecht's poem, seems to descend steadily, as it progresses, from the poetic to the mundane. Its conclusion ought to be startling, but it has very little impact, because the audience, like Helene, has already been through so much.

From NYTimes