“Confession of a sinner” on Arte: A modern but too wise Mary Magdalene

1951. A woman, black and white and a German feature film that will cause a scandal.

In the collective imagination (Christian and Western), she is the repentant sinner. An “easy woman”, a sex worker. The one who made the mistake, set up as a counter-example of virtuous femininity, the one who makes her body her job. Marie-Madeleine, figure of redemption, has continued to be revisited in the cinema, through different faces…

In 1951, at the end of the war, Willi Forst embraced the myth. He makes Hildegard Knef the Mary Magdalene of modern times. The German actress lends her features to the character of Marina in Confession of a sinner.

Our heroine is a young girl who grows up in a Germany mistreated by the Hitler regime. While her stepfather suffers the horrors of the Gestapo, her mother escapes the ambient gloom by deceiving him, accumulating lovers and nocturnal outings in full view of her family… One evening, her brother by marriage becomes aware of her beauty and a carnal relationship begins between the two young people, in the vagueness of Marina’s consent. This is where her life takes another turn…After being kicked out of her home, she is thrown into the street where her beauty becomes an advantage. Before meeting a painter who carries with him a fatal sentence…