Some time ago, when Nina Gummich was in front of the camera for the crime thriller “Theresa Wolff 3”, the make-up artist came to her and whispered to her: “Nina, attention, you still look like Alice!” She had previously played women’s rights activist Alice Schwarzer for the ARD feature film “Alice”.
Gummich (31) not only looks deceptively similar to the young black man in the film, she also very convincingly embodies the role model in her speech and movements, without ever slipping into parody.
“I wanted to capture her core, and that just doesn’t work by imitating her looks or copying her gestures,” explains the Leipzig native of the German Press Agency. “So I looked, what does it do to my whole posture and my mood when I look or speak in this certain way, and then I internalized it and it became a sure-fire success.”
In addition, she met Alice Schwarzer again and again during filming to squeeze and observe her. Schwarzer, who turns 80 on December 3, confirms this to the dpa: “Nina kept contacting me and asking: “What did you think in that and that situation at the time?” I always tried to answer that as precisely as possible .”
The film directed by Nicole Weegmann, which will be shown in Esten on November 30 from 8:15 p.m., tells Schwarzer’s journey from being a 21-year-old au pair in Paris to founding her feminist magazine “Emma” in Cologne in 1977. Milestones are the initiation of the confession “We have had an abortion” in 1971 on the front page of “Stern” and in 1975 a TV argument with Esther Vilar, the author of the bestseller “The Trained Man”. This three quarters of an hour in the afternoon program made Schwarzer famous in one fell swoop.
Working on the film has changed Gummich’s view of Schwarzer. “When I saw historical recordings, I was surprised by the tenderness, melancholy and this touch of Paris that emanates from her. There is something else that I did not expect: Alice Schwarzer has a very childish side, she is playful and compassionate, cheeky and curious. Not losing these qualities in old age I consider particularly valuable and unusual.”
Schwarzer is repeatedly accused of being authoritarian. Gummich had a special experience during the shoot: “There is a scene in Part 2, where I call on women from Berlin to provide texts for a book that I then want to present to Rowohlt Verlag. The women come to Paris, and we have a good time – writing, discussing, smoking, drinking, snogging – which is what you do when you’re reinventing the world.”
In the end, as Alice Schwarzer, she reads the other women’s texts and totally freaks out because she finds them so bad. The women react hurt and leave. “When I was playing I didn’t understand at all how that could happen. Inside I was totally open to further objective discussions and possibly to rewriting the texts or something,” says Gummich. “Everyone around on the set then mirrored to me how authoritarian it came across and thought it was great in terms of play.”
From this she concludes: “Alice can completely devalue on the factual level and then immediately have a coffee with you.”
Alice/ARD
