Anita Berber may well have been the most scandalous woman of Weimar Berlin. The first to dance nude in public, openly bisexual, and openly addicted to drugs, she performed on such subjects as Vice, Horror, and Ecstasy. In Rosa Von Praunheim's new film, Anita, who died of tuberculosis in 1928, is revived in the person of an old woman (the hilarious Lotti Huber) who threatens to take off her clothes in public, then reveals to the staff of the mental institution to which she is committed that she is Anita Berber, come to life. The memory of her wild, short life is captured as an expressionistic silent film-within-a-film, color where the asylum is black-and-white; the decadence of Berlin in the twenties is played as a piece of period innocence against the raw contemporary reality. "The alienated play's the thing," writes J. Hoberman in the Village Voice. "The combination of exuberantly tacky expressionism and near-pornographic insolence transcends period reconstruction. It's a pity Christopher Isherwood didn't live to see this film."