Die Legende von Paul und Paula

The Legend of Paul and Paula seems simple yet not boring. However, the film has profound ideas to tell – gender roles, social inequality and escapism. I like the film's way portraying of everyday life in East Berlin. You can almost see and feel the city. The love story between a passionate single mother and a complacent, married bureaucrat is not your typical Hollywood movie. The film also has a psychedelic and hippie feel. The soundtrack suits the film. I like the portions of the film where some elements (like the band that plays music while Paul and Paula are making love) are placed for no reason. The movie has a simple charm that captivates audiences. I guess that the film's success lies in its way of making the ordinary scenes of life extraordinary.

This picture, which has been shown in East Germany for only a week until political censors understood its impact on the people, is a very realistic East German view of life in post war East Berlin. It's mainly about the romance of Paul, a privileged but unhappy secret service agent, and Paula, an underprivileged and single girl with children. Since it is one of the very few movies which portraits honest details of real life in East Berlin at that time, it now serves as a reminder of emotions and feelings for a lot of East Germans. Despite the heavy use of symbolism (pretty old houses are blown away for the construction of uniform socialist buildings) it still doesn't draw a too pessimistic picture and leaves space for dreams and hope. I really love this movie, and I would recommend it to anyone who wants to catch a glimpse idea of how life was at that time in a socialistic system. The film is available with English subtitles which gives foreigners the chance to understand it, too.

Heiner Carow's "Die Legende von Paul und Paula" is the first GDR film I've watched which centered on a woman and her development as an individual, which was new to DEFA within that period of time. "Die Legende..." is different from other films made before it since the story was about a woman who seeks for self-fulfillment and follows her heart in spite of the rigidity of societal norms.

In this film, Paula is the epitome of what women were mostly portrayed as in the 1970s: emotional rather than rational.

Paula is a quirk of a character. She wears her heart on her sleeve and cares not one bit what happens as long as she is happy. She seems a bit over the edge at some points in the film, though. As if she were about to break down at a moment's notice. Her character is intense and Angelica Dumrose fully consummates the part.

This is a film from the time when you only saw Trabant (GDR-made) and Volga (Soviet-made) cars on the streets. It is a sad love story, set among the ruins of old German houses and the new blocks of socialism. In the soundtrack we hear some songs by the band from DDR Die Puhdys, unfortunately not the best from their repertoire, actually some very bad, they having some really excellent ones, being the most valuable rock band in communist Germany. For a film made in that period, when in countries like GDR, Poland, Romania, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Albania the films were nothing but communist propaganda, this film is a real exception, being very libertine, something inexplicable how it got away of the fierce censorship of the regime. In Yugoslavia the situation was different, they were much freer. And, there were bolder films in Hungary, Poland, Romania, but they were banned soon after release or scenes were cut. Angelica Domröse plays a role full of courage, totally unconventional for the politics behind the iron curtain. Scenes of sex and alcohol consumption could not be seen in those films of communist countries where everyone had to appear happy, without problems, living a wonderful life, in a perfect society, where children were brought by storks, not being the fruit of a sexual act between a man and a woman.

If you want to get the feel of life in East Germany and of life in the 70s, this is your film. It is critical of the socialist system (national socialism ended in 1945, afterwards there was no Nazi-propaganda anywhere anymore, especially not in the East! Sorry, but another reviewer got this wrong), offers a romantic story and good acting by well-known actors. It is still cult in Berlin, where you can regularly see in the cinema. It kicked off the wave of east-German nostalgia. The film was so successful that today you can still see references to it in other films (eg. "Sonnenallee") and that the city decided to name a path along a lake "Paul und Paula Ufer" with a Paul und Paula bench to sit on. Also the soundtrack is worth listening to (especially the lyrics) and marked the beginning of the Puhdys'huge career.