Resolutely unshowy, this portrait of the emigrant German-Jewish writer who covered the trial of Nazi Adolf Eichmann for the New Yorker and coined the phrase "the banality of evil" is a compelling depiction of a contest of ideas.
Even the choice of title - it was to have been called Controversy - is testament to its plainness.
Many of the words are Arendt's own, drawn from letters and lectures, and it unfolds as a series of conversations between people in tweed and tan in gloomy rooms. And it's as gripping as a thriller.
Starting in 1975 with The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum, which she made with then-husband Volker Schlondorff, von Trotta has always placed women at the centre of the frame.
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Advertise with NZME.Rosa Luxemburg, her 1986 portrait of the Marxist pioneer, earned Sukowa, in the title role, a Cannes best actress prize. The actress radiates a brave and heroic beauty here as she incarnates one of last century's great intellectual heroes.
A chillingly deft blend of archive footage and acted sequences gives us the sense of being at the ringside of history and cinematographer Caroline Champetier and designer Yann Megard, who collaborated on the sublime Of Gods and Men, evoke the period with precision and grace.
Arendt's conclusion that Eichmann was possessed of "no satanic greatness but only an inability to think" was portrayed as an attempt at exculpation, but it was no such thing (indeed her final New Yorker piece closed with the words "you must hang").
This film rightly celebrates the life of a political philosopher who reminded us that ideology is almost invariably hostile to ideas.
Cast: Barbara Sukowa, Axel Milberg, Klaus Pohl, Janet McTeer, Julia Jentsch, Ulrich Noethen
Director: Margarethe von Trotta
Running time: 109 mins
Rating: M In English and German with English subtitles
Verdict: Ringside-seat view of history.
- TimeOut
