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When Aimée & Jaguar -- the true story of lesbian love between a Jew and a German in WWII Berlin -- opened in Germany last year, it was received "unexpectedly well." That's according to its star, Maria Schrader, who plays the brave and sultry Felice Schragenheim, a Jew living in the underground, with a mesmerizing force. "I expected it to be of less interest," says Schrader, 34. "Especially with people from our generation. They don't want to see that anymore; they don't want to see Third Reich stories. They want to go to the movies to have fun." But this Third Reich film, also the first lesbian love story to hit the big screen in Germany, was bound to get some serious attention. And while it didn't cause much controversy to speak of (one theater owner in Heidelburg refused to show the film), it struck an important chord with its audience. "I got many letters, mostly from lesbians -- people who are also not sure about themselves, and struggling," says the actress, a Berlin resident who's in New York to promote the film before it opens on Friday, August 11. She's just arrived from Prague, where she was shooting her next project, Josephine, a "kind of a fairy tale ... very Eastern European," in which she plays a drug-addicted stripper and mother. This morning, Schrader is sitting in a West Side diner, breaking up a jumbo chocolate chip cookie (breakfast) and dunking it into a frothy cappuccino. Her hair -- which is sleek and black in Aimée & Jaguar -- is a brassy, cartoonish red, dyed for her part in Josephine, and it's framing her striking face in sugary wisps. Rajko Grlic, Josephine's director, had seen her with red hair in a previous film and suggested she dye it again for the part. "I said, 'I have to do it,'" Schrader says, smiling devilishly, "because my boyfriend fell in love with me as a redhead." The girlfriend of a male film director and the mother of a two-year-old girl named Felice (inspired by mom's character in Aimée & Jaguar), Schrader was not uncomfortable playing a lesbian on screen and says she never even considered that it could have a negative impact on her award-winning film career. (She's made at least eight features, including 1995's Nobody Loves Me, for which she received the German Film Prize.) During the making of Aimée & Jaguar, in which she plays opposite Juliane Köhler, the women kept forgetting that it was not a straight love story, she says, because the affection between them just felt like any other love. "She's a wonderful actress ... she's like this theater beast," Schrader says about her co-star. She is candid and unfettered when she discusses her onscreen relationship with Köhler (who became an off-screen friend). "We have an equal strength," she says. "Sometimes it was like a tennis match." The first time the two women go to bed together in the film is so real and gorgeous and unslick that it's hard to watch -- but even harder to look away. "I'm trembling," Lilly tells Felice, visibly quaking with fear. "Me too. We're both trembling," Felice whispers sweetly. "It's a trembling contest." The scene, Schrader says, with a far-off glint in her eyes, "is rather a scene of fear than of love" -- fear of taboo desire, of war, of finding deep love and knowing it could all be over soon. The story of Aimée & Jaguar (the pet names the lovers called each other) is based on the 1996 book of the same name, as told to writer Erica Fischer by Lilly Wust, who decided to let her love story be known nearly 30 years after Felice had been hauled off to a concentration camp, never to emerge. Schrader was sent the book and offered the part by the film's director, Max Färberböck, and read it in one tearful night. "I was very certain I wanted to do it, even without reading the script," she recalls. Schrader was chosen to play Felice by Wust herself, now 87 and living in Berlin, who had seen her in another film. The two met each other on the first day of shooting. "It was terror," Schrader admits. "I'm already the kind of actress who is nervous on the first few days." Schrader recalls being struck by Wust when she entered the set: she was a small, frail woman surrounded by lights and film types and curious journalists, but she remained poised and unfettered. "She didn't seem to be very impressed by all that," Schrader says. The crew sat Wust in a chair about four feet away from the actress, who had never played a nonfiction character before, and was attempting to film an intense, close-up scene. "I couldn't do it," she recalls. "If you play the kind of character that someone invented, then I think they need me to get life into their character." Playing someone real, she says, is overwhelming, because you just want to get it right. But Wust was pleased with the way she carried out the role. "I was very happy about the two principal actresses," she said while in New York recently for the film's June premiere at the Lesbian and Gay Film Festival. "There couldn't have been a better choice than those two." Schrader, though biased, agrees that the film was well done -- and she largely credits the director. "People ask me, 'Don't you think a movie like this should be made by a woman?' But [Färberböck] is the one who fought for such intensity in the movie." She also believes that it offered a fair and complex depiction of the Holocaust -- something she finds to be a rarity in film. "There's always the Nazi with the stupid eyes, the Jews so hunched and intellectual," she huffs, becoming visibly drained about the topic. "I was very aware of the whole thing from when I was little; my political consciousness awoke with it." Her father was a social democrat, and her grandfather never joined the Nazi Party. To further sensitize her, Schrader's dad sent her to spend three months in Israel when she was 14, where she stayed in an arts camp that brought young Jews and Germans together. It's where she started acting, switching from her original creative outlet, playing the piano. ("The drama teacher was the best-looking man," she says with a giggle.) With Aimée & Jaguar, it's as if she's finally come full circle, reconciling both her Holocaust-sensitive upbringing with her acting skills. And through her role, she's learned even more, she says -- about hope and fear and living for the moment. "I wish I was more like [Felice]," she admits, "a free spirit, with so much courage." * Read the PopcornQ review of Aimée & Jaguar PQ MOVIE NEWS: PQ Video Hot List | Interviews | Advance Guide to Queer Film | Movie News Archive | PQ Video Hot Lists Galore MORE NEWS ON PLANETOUT: PlanetOut News & Politics | PlanetOutRadio | Entertainment
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