`Nasty Girl' Exudes Spirit And Satire

Nearly a decade ago, German director Michael Verhoeven cast Lena Stolze in her first film, ``The White Rose,'' the true story of a student anti-Nazi movement in Germany during World War II.

Stolze played Sophie Scholl, who was executed in 1943 for her leading role in the resistance at the University of Munich. In 1983, Stolze played the martyred Scholl for a second time in Percy Adlon's ``The Last Days.''

In Verhoeven's new movie, ``The Nasty Girl,'' which opens Friday at the Seven Gables, Stolze again takes up the role of a well-known anti-fascist: Anja Elisabeth Rosmus, who won a prize named after Scholl for her 1983 book, ``A Case of Resistance and Persecution, Passau 1933-1939.''

This time, however, the tone of the movie is satirical rather than earnest, spirited rather than glum, and Stolze gives an inspired comic performance as a small-town girl who refuses to cover up her town's Nazi past. The movie finds humor not in the Holocaust but in the elaborate, self-deluding denials of people who participated on the fringes of it.

To that small group of American film buffs who know only that Verhoeven is not to be confused with Paul Verhoeven (the Dutch director of ``Robocop'' and ``Total Recall''), this will come as a complete turnabout.

In style and attitude, ``The Nasty Girl'' could not be less like ``The White Rose,'' which is his only previous film to be released in the United States. Verhoeven, however, says it's more representative of his work.

``I did this kind of satirical, experimental film before, beginning with a 1967 film of Strindberg's `The Dance of Death,' starring Lilli Palmer,'' he said by phone from New York recently. His earlier movies include ``People Who Live in Glass Houses,'' ``Plenty to Eat on a Silver Platter'' and ``OK,'' a controversial 1970 production which is based on the same Vietnam War incident that inspired Brian de Palma's ``Casualties of War.''

``There are many reasons why `The White Rose' could not to be ironic,'' he said. ``Sophie's story is very famous in my country. I was touched very much by what I knew, by meeting the survivors of that period, who told me quite other things than had been written in German history books. The books insisted the Munich resistance was naive and dangerous, brave but not a good example. The movement was much more political than they acknowledged.''

Verhoeven said he had some trouble getting ``The White Rose'' screened at first. The Goethe Institute would not allow it to be shown because the resistance is still officially condemned for its tactics. But her story turned out to be too famous to be suppressed for long.

``Sophie was very well known,'' he said. ``Everyone knew what she looked like, and it was almost too much to cast Lena because she looked so much like her.'' She was also his first choice for ``The Nasty Girl,'' which he decided to make after meeting Rosmus.

``Her stories of the villagers' ridiculous attempts to suppress the facts were so interesting,'' he said, ``and her experience was so typical of small German towns in the 1950s and 1960s (Rosmus was born in 1960). Some things in the film are from my own experience, though we had the same kind of Catholic-German education, and there was a lot of overlap.''

He admits he wasn't certain the satirical approach would work. A more straightforward documentary about Rosmus has since been produced by German television.

``I was always afraid of going over the line, and no one could help me, tell me where I was going wrong,'' he said. ``But I wanted that edge. People are laughing through most of the first hour, then the seriousness of the situation becomes clear.''

He recognizes some similarities to Marcel Ophuls' Oscar-winning documentary, ``Hotel Terminus: The Life and Times of Klaus Barbie,'' which takes a frequently sarcastic approach to interviewing ex-Nazis. He finds Ophuls' approach both funny and chilling, especially in its revelations about German attitudes toward the Nazi past.

``In that film you could sense a tradition of resistance in France,'' he said. ``But there were some German war criminals who hid themselves in Argentina and came back to Germany without fear that something would happen to them. One of the main criminals is scheduled to fly to Germany, but when it's announced the plane is going to France he turns pale. This is shameful: that he's not frightened to go back to Germany.''

Verhoeven says he doesn't fear reunification (``I don't think it's dangerous for other countries, except perhaps economically''), but his new film, ``Wonderland,'' doesn't reflect an ecstatic attitude about the merging of East and West.

``It's the story of two people from the East who go to the West to find wonderland,'' he said. ``They're looking for this fairy tale, and they arrive in Munich just as the wall breaks down - and they feel empty.''