Just a prostitute. The film “Sinner” by West German director Willy Forst tells the story of a prostitute Marina, who fell in love with the brilliant artist Alexander. This love changed her whole life, teaching love, compassion, sacrifice. The story is told in the first person, by Marina herself, whose role was brilliantly performed by the magnificent Hildegard Knef.
Since childhood, Marina realized that women have a certain kind of power over men. Her mother showed her own example of how to do it. Living with her husband (Marina's stepfather), every evening she went "to visit", a car came for her and took her away the night before morning. Later, as a schoolgirl, Marina received practical knowledge about this side of life from her half-brother, who generously gifted her for short-term inconveniences of a bed nature. Dresses, decorations, treats - it turned out, you can live chorusily at the expense of these offerings. When the stepfather was tired of this debauchery, he nailed his son and kicked both whores out of the house: the mother fled in an unknown direction, and Marina went to live with a friend who had long been professionally engaged in self-selling.
Being a prostitute, Marina practically did not notice the changes taking place in the country - she was equally in demand under the Nazis and under the occupation of the Allies, "only uniforms were changed, and there was the same emptiness around", until one day he appeared, a talented artist-drunk, who at one time was very popular, but lost respect, wife and fortune due to drunkenness.
If you think that's the whole story -- no, there's still a lot of romance and tears, soaring to the top and falling into the abyss, going to Venice and triumphantly coming back to Germany, would be enough for a season of modern TV, but Willie Forst did it in an hour and twenty minutes, and he did it very well. It is interesting to watch the film, mainly because of Frau Knef, a cold beauty, who in this film, for the first time in the history of German cinema, starred in one of the scenes completely naked (bottom frame).
The film, shot six years after the fall of the Third Reich and ten years before the Berlin Wall, is a romantic melodrama in essence, but some critics saw in the tape an attempt to make sense of what happened to the German people. In principle, of course, if we take the image of Marina as a metaphorical depiction of Germany, then the film turns from a romantic-tragic melodrama into a socio-philosophical reflection, but I think this is superfluous. The film is good enough, there is nothing else to say. Sometimes a prostitute in the movie is just a prostitute.