‘The Girl With The Leica’ Review: An Impressionistic Portrait of Gerda Taro, the Woman Who Shared the Artistic Identity of Robert Capa

For many people, the name Robert Capa evokes a mysterious, jet-setting American photographer responsible for some of the mid-20^th century’s most iconic images from the frontlines of war. In the fascinating “The Girl With The Leica,” Italian director Alina Marazzi puts paid to that myth. The time-jumping film reclaims the legacy of German-born photojournalist Gerda Taro (née Gerta Pohorylle) and illuminates her contributions to the invention of Capa, an alias embodied by the charismatic Hungarian shutterbug born Endre Erno Friedmann, aka André Friedmann. As scholars now know, Capa’s early oeuvre encompassed works by both him and Taro. The engrossing “Leica” serves as the opening to the Venice Horizons section and should have a strong festival and ancillary career.

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Neither a conventional biopic nor a straightforward documentary, “The Girl With The Leica” offers fact-based fiction delivered in an energetic, impressionistic style that immerses viewers in the turmoil of the characters’ lives and times. Intertwining past and present, the film fluidly blends color dramatic sequences with black-and-white archival footage, newsreels and amateur home movies. It also mixes Super 8 and Super 16mm formats alongside rarely seen photographs. But most importantly, it allows viewers to reflect on the political power of images while giving a voice to the brave female photojournalist whose talent, passion and skill were nearly lost to history, subsumed by a legend of her own creation.

Filmed in the European languages the characters actually spoke, “The Girl With the Leica” should profit from this authenticity, as well as from appearing in advance of the forthcoming English-language drama-romance “Becoming Capa,” directed by Charlotte Colbert and starring Mark Eydelshteyn and Esther McGregor.

Marazzi and co-screenwriter Valia Santella ground their non-linear narrative by using the date of July 14, 1937 as a jumping-off point to move backwards and forwards in time through the recollections and point of view of the title character. The intelligent, curious Taro (Emilia Schüle) is born in 1910 to a Jewish family that moves from Stuttgart to Leipzig. She grows into a captivating free spirit with socialist sympathies and many male admirers. In Leipzig, she belongs to a circle of like-minded twentysomethings whose resistance activities against the Nazi government put them in danger. After being arrested and released, most of them flee to Paris.

In the City of Light, Taro shares a bug-infested, cold-water flat with her best friend Ruth Cerf (Luna Wedler). The two ambitious, attractive young women form relationships with other refugees including Fred Stein (Hans-Christian Hegewald) and David “Chim” Seymour (Idan Weiss), both photographers, before meeting the Hungarians, André Friedmann (Aaron Altaras, nearly a dead ringer for the real man) and Csiki Weisz (Sebastian Schneider). 

The chemistry between the confident, seductive Taro and the scruffy, devil-may-care Friedmann is immediate and obvious, despite her being several years his senior and tending to boss him around. She believes in his talent and helps stabilize his career while he teaches her more about photography. The couple’s audacious decision to adopt names that sound less foreign — and less Jewish — proves a smart strategy. As they explain to their friends, it enables them to command better fees and assignments. After a period of allowing her work to be published under the Capa alias, Taro starts to claim her own photo credits and serves as the Spanish Civil War correspondent for Ce Soir, the Paris Communist newspaper.

July 14, 1937 marks a period when Taro makes plans to leave Paris to return to the frontlines of the Spanish Civil War. It’s the site of some of her most remarkable pictures, including one of a Republican militiawoman training in high heels, kneeling on a beaching and aiming a pistol. The film continually stresses Taro’s commitment to the Spanish Republican cause. She repeatedly tells her friends that the Republicans are doing what their generation should have done in Germany. That’s why, in spite of the danger and increasing brutality of the war, she wants to be there to document what’s happening, to take a stand.

As Taro visits old friends before departing, including former lover Willy Chardack (Thomas Schubert), the day provides a springboard to her memories of becoming politically active alongside her first serious boyfriend Georg Kuritzkes (Lucas Englander), the rise of the Nazism and the threats to German Jews. 

While not looking much like the actual Taro, Schüle captures the energy her friends described her as having. She successfully conveys the complexities of Taro’s character, showing her as a dedicated photojournalist and anti-fascist as well as a woman who loves to seduce and be desired. As Taro tells Ruth, she’s not meant for only one man. The film shows Capa proposing marriage, but Taro refuses to accept, and freely moves on to smitten Canadian reporter Ted Allan (Jeremy Mockridge). It’s Allan who accompanies her to the frontline in Brunete, Spain where she dies on July 26, 1937, less than a week before her 27^th birthday.

Given the number of interesting characters that Marazzi introduces, it sometimes feels as if not all of them get their due. A miniseries might have done this Bohemian crowd more justice. Nevertheless, this good-looking, well-paced film provides an entry point to an important piece of history.