Tuesday | April 4, 2000 9:00 pm

La Habañera

Screening on Film

Directed by Detlef Sierck (Douglas Sirk).
With Zarah Leander, Karl Martell, Ferdinand Marian.
Germany, 1937, 35mm, color, 100 min.
German with English subtitles.

La Habañera portrays a Scandinavian woman’s foreign affair, a romance with an exotic landscape, a seductive song, and a Latin lover. Astrée goes astray and surrenders to a reckless moment. The paradise quickly loses its luster as she becomes a veritable hostage, bound to a tyrant who torments her. Her only solace is her young son, with whom she imagines life back in the snow of Sweden. La Habañera is a consummate example of Nazi cinema’s own foreign affair: its conscious attempt to appropriate the Hollywood melodrama for domestic audiences.