Berlinale Picks: Rose by Markus Schleinzer

The new film Rose by Markus Schleinzer premiered at the Berlinale, where Sandra Hüller, in the leading role, received the Silver Bear for Best Leading Performance. The Austrian-German production will be released in German cinemas on 30 April. Burcu Beaufort met Schleinzer in Berlin for a press conversation about Rose, a film that explores identity, personal freedom, and the limits imposed by society. Below is our conversation.

The first obvious question, before we get to black and white, how did the idea for the story begin?

Markus Schleinzer I’m not this kind of filmmaker who is interested in what nowadays seems to be modern. So I’m not going to bookshops and asking people what the most sold novels are, thinking this might be a success because everybody’s interested in this particular story now. I just wait if something comes up which interests me as a person. Because filmmaking is such a long, long process, and if you pick a topic, it must be something that can stay with you for a long time.

So what was the moment that triggered Rose specifically?

MS I had a birthday, and a friend of mine, she’s a historian, called to say congrats. And what a funny coincidence: she was just reading a crime file about a woman who had been executed on this very day, exactly 250 years ago. And I don’t know how other people feel, but when I have birthdays, sometimes I start to think everything is somehow connected to me. So I said, yeah, could you send me over this file? And this is how I started to get into this issue.

And from that one file, you began researching further?

MS Of course, I had been aware of it before. I had seen cross-dressing movies. But then I started research, and I was able to discover about 300 women, across different centuries, who chose this path, putting on trousers to achieve whatever they wanted to achieve. It was very interesting because the motives were always clear to me, but very different.

What kind of motivations did you find?

MS There were women who did not want to marry the man chosen by their father. There were women whose husbands had died, or who didn’t have a man who could earn money, and they had to disguise themselves to get work. There were romantic stories, women who followed their husbands into war. There is also this very famous novel Gustav Adolfs Page (Conrad Ferdinand Meyer, 1882), I don’t know the translation, about a family where the son or nephew is afraid of going to war, and the family would be pushed out of society. So they send the daughter instead. We also still have “female husbands” in parts of Africa, and historically in Europe as well.. When there is no male heir, a woman is chosen and has to live as a man from that day on.

And how were these lives understood at the time?

MS Of course, there have been lesbians, and maybe people who today would define themselves as transgender, but there was no word for it, no concept that this was even possible. Female sexuality, female homosexuality, was not a topic. Women living together? They must have been cousins. Because everything was defined by penetration.

What ultimately connects all of these stories for you?

MS So the motives were touching and varied, but the cause was always the same: freedom. Personal freedom. Who do I want to be? Who decides how I live? This felt quite modern to me. Because we pretend we’ve come far in feminism, but to my mind, not really.

You mentioned structural inequality, did your own experience in the industry shape this perspective?

MS I was a casting director for 17 years. Casting is a so-called female job in the film industry, like makeup or costume. And for 17 years, I was paid badly, because I earned the same as my female casting colleagues. So why do we still have this? I don’t even understand it from an economic perspective. If women earned the same as men, there would be more money to spend. But society seems to define everything through money.

How did the research process develop from there?

MS That was the beginning of my research. We ended up with a lot of material. One very touching part is that the women I could find were only those who had been caught. Most of the texts came from courts, judges, juries. So the real number must be much higher. ou also mentioned differences across Europe.

What did you observe there?

MS In Europe, there’s a line. In Catholic states, there were very few cases. In Protestant areas, many more. A friend explained it to me: Catholics married their women very early, sometimes at 12, 13, 14. Protestants married later, between 18 and 20. So those young women had more time to reflect, to decide if they wanted to follow the path chosen for them or define their own lives.

It’s interesting to see this film next to your first one, Michael (2011). In both cases, you have someone who follows what they want in life, going against the morality of the time. But in Michael, we condemn the person, in Rose the villain is the society. Is it dangerous to present the community as the villain?

MS I remember the time in Austria, there was the case of Natascha Kampusch, and also the Fritzl case. Horrifying crimes. When Kampusch was freed, she was everyone’s darling for two or three months. Then society turned on her, because she didn’t behave the way the society expected.  So what happens is this: victims often become targets. It has to do with empathy. Empathy doesn’t last long. If we feel empathy, at a certain point we have to act. But there’s so much suffering in the world, if we felt everything all the time, we couldn’t function. Also, I was very upset with Austrian society. The perpetrator was turned into a monster. But I don’t think that helps. A monster is something from a fairy tale. You can distance yourself from it. But if it’s a human being: a neighbor, a son, a brother. That’s harder to accept. With Michael, I wanted to show that it is the human being who commits a horrible crime. Not to excuse it; but to force us to confront that it is a person which is hard to bear. It was what I tried with Michael. I cannot understand his crimes but I have to accept that this is society.

And with Rose, is your approach to “the others” different?

MS With Rose, it’s different. I see where the question comes from, I made three movies so far and circled around the idea of so-called “the others” in society.  But I think we are all others in society. Very often people ask if this is a queer movie. Yes, of course, but we are all queer. You are you, I am me. Maybe we should redefine queerness more broadly and live in peace.

What, then, is really at stake for you in the film?

MS The question is: what limits us? Why do we need these limitations? Sometimes I feel society needs someone to be below, so others can feel above. We need to be careful about symbols, about language, about how we treat each other. Too often, it’s about being “better” than someone else.

Let’s come back to the visual choice: why black and white?

MS It’s a choice. And we discussed it for a long time. Black and white helps, for me, to show how ridiculous we are, and how easily we fall for symbols. It removes distraction. It makes things equal. You focus on the essence, the story, the performance. If someone is wounded, the red blood is dramatic. But in black and white, blood is just grey. So I need the actor to show me the pain and not the color. If one soldier wears blue and another green, in black and white you can’t tell who is who. So you have to think: who is “good”? Who is “bad”? It forces the audience to decide, instead of relying on symbols.

Is there something in Rose’s story that you personally relate to? Not from a gender specific way, but more general, as a person.

MS When I wrote this, it was very emotional for me. I never thought, “How would a woman feel?” It’s all very basic, very human. It’s about not being able to live the life others consider normal. That’s something we all understand. Living with secrets. Not being able to tell something out of shame. Asking: who am I? Am I loved? These all are very close to me and very touching.

And how do you work with your actors?

MS It always depends on the person. In the previous movie I made, Angelo (2018), a friend of mine was playing the emperor, Lukas Miko. With him we started preparing for his part three years ahead of shooting, even though he had only a few monologues. He loves preparation.  With Sandra, it was different. She’s incredibly talented and experienced. We discussed the script in depth; what each scene means, not how to perform it. On set, I step back. I believe in trust and I believe in secrets; I don’t need to know how she does it.