Her Third ‘Der Dritte’
1972 // East Germany // Egon Günther
HER THIRD is first and foremost a feminist film, it’s about an independent woman striving for her love and happiness after two marriages; it’s also a queer film. The revelation took me off guard since the homosexual sensibility is so subtle that when the two central female characters have their intimate moment finally, I was startled.
But asides from that, HER THIRD is quite “straight”. Throughout the film the main objective of Margit (Jutta Hoffmann), a computer technician with two daughters from her two previous marriage, is to find herself a third husband. Episodes of flashbacks are inserted to provide the background of Margit‘s past, from her mother’s death and her youth in a nun school, to her twice failed marriage. She gave up her vocation to God for the favor of “personal development”. She met her first husband Bachmann (Peter Köhncke) at college. He’s the science teacher and their love affair soon ended when Margit was pregnant. She then married to a blind man (Armin Mueller-Stahl) and had a second daughter, but when the man’s drunken rage was too overbearing, she left.
In the present day, with the help from her closest friend and colleague Lucie (Barbara Dittus), Margit is determined to find her third chance of happiness. And her target is Hrdlitschka (Rolf Ludwig), a man also working in the same company notwithstanding they never met formally. Margit takes the proactive role, trying to learn (investigate) Hrdlitschka’s person as much as possible before making her first move, a “fortuitous” encounter on a train.
The handheld camerawork offers a documentary look, evoking an intimacy and spontaneity from a character study of a single working mother who is dissatisfied with her experience with men and her current life. It’s hard for me to have an empathetic connection with Margit though, and her relationship with Lucie is relatively underdeveloped. And after the shocking revelation, the film seems to drop the thread entirely. The ending is open for interpretation of whether Margit does find her true love and happiness by marrying Hrdlitschka. It’s not rare for a film from behind the iron curtain featuring strong female leads, HER THIRD is not an exception and indeed Jutta Hoffmann swells with great intensity in her best moment.
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