The English title of Die Berührte is taken from graffiti on an abandoned building next to the Berlin Wall, and the Wall as concrete and metaphorical divide appears repeatedly throughout the film. Berlin appears cold, gray. Schizophrenic Veronika walks the city streets alone, looking for Christ, looking for human contact, for connection.
In their aseptic home her wealthy parents listen to a radio which endlessly drones stock prices, while on the street, the S-Bahn, in cafés Veronika experiences a sensual world freighted with hidden meanings. Home is a prison from which she seeks release through suicide. She is hospitalized, drugged, and released. In coitus she finds brief connection but neither the union she seeks with the infinite nor more than a temporary respite from loneliness.
Veronika attempts marriage with penniless Ghanaian Demba, an exotic symbol of the libertine south who she brings home to her parents' disgust, but Demba shows her no commitment, no loyalty, and in fact provides the basis for her forcible rehospitalization.
Here, as in several previous films, Helma Sanders-Brahms' protagonist is a strong woman suffering, nearly crushed, by the patriarchal forces of western industrial society. While at the film's open the viewer is told Veronika's real-life counterpart was almost cured, (at least, the film says, according to the doctors), there is no such cure shown within the movie. In the film's abrupt end rather, we see Veronika's search for Christ in a dramatic new light.
In their aseptic home her wealthy parents listen to a radio which endlessly drones stock prices, while on the street, the S-Bahn, in cafés Veronika experiences a sensual world freighted with hidden meanings. Home is a prison from which she seeks release through suicide. She is hospitalized, drugged, and released. In coitus she finds brief connection but neither the union she seeks with the infinite nor more than a temporary respite from loneliness.
Veronika attempts marriage with penniless Ghanaian Demba, an exotic symbol of the libertine south who she brings home to her parents' disgust, but Demba shows her no commitment, no loyalty, and in fact provides the basis for her forcible rehospitalization.
Here, as in several previous films, Helma Sanders-Brahms' protagonist is a strong woman suffering, nearly crushed, by the patriarchal forces of western industrial society. While at the film's open the viewer is told Veronika's real-life counterpart was almost cured, (at least, the film says, according to the doctors), there is no such cure shown within the movie. In the film's abrupt end rather, we see Veronika's search for Christ in a dramatic new light.