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How do you solve a problem like Maria? That’s more or less the question veteran actor turned filmmaker Maximilian Schell poses at the beginning of his collage about his aged actress sister. The doctor responding to his enquiry gazes at an MRI of her circulatory system, and, citing Thoreau, notes that we all make our own reality, and who’s to say which is real? The reality Schell makes of his sister, now a recluse living in the family home in Alpine Austria surrounded by 11 TV sets constantly blasting the movies made in her ’50s prime, is not unlike the wry pastiche he constructed about Dietrich in his 1984 Marlene, but more intimate and less precise. The film snippets — from Die letzte Brücke, Le notti bianche, The Brothers Karamazov, The Hanging Tree, and others — demonstrate the luminous vitality that made her a box-office star and a symbol of rebirth for postwar Germany. As for how she has since turned into a dotty spendthrift with an apparent but unspecified mental disorder whose debts have forced Schell to sell a Mark Rothko to bail her out, the film provides no clear answer. Blurring interviews with staged re-enactments of family crises and montages from Schell films (brother and sister both: scenes from Maximilian’s Deep Impact play an odd role), it might portray the director’s Maria, but her own reality remains elusive. In German with English subtitles. (90 minutes)
BY PETER KEOUGH
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