Manuela, the new arrival, is mesmerized by Miss von Bernburg’s silhouette bestowing a kiss across the room: two shadows meld into one. It’s about what it feels like for a girl.Įarly in the film, a neat row of covetous schoolgirls in white dresses line themselves up on their knees, waiting for a goodnight kiss from their governess. The kiss, which takes place behind the closed doors of a dorm, isn’t about who’s performing for whom. Unlike in Morocco, there are no titillated men to be found in Mädchen in Uniform. It is the schoolgirls who are jacked and lusty, the schoolmarms who are patriarchal and tyrannical. It’s true that a year earlier, in 1930, Marlene Dietrich played a tux-clad chanteuse who snogs a woman in a nightclub audience in Morocco, but Dietrich has no further contact with this female extra, and the kiss is cynically if efficaciously played to the star’s male love interest, a legionnaire (Gary Cooper) who’s watching her saucy performance intently. The first real lesbian kiss in a film is an honor that rightfully belongs to Mädchen in Uniform.
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