“An ironic English title for Schlöndorff's seventh feature film, made in collaboration with its star, his wife Margarethe von Trotta (now a filmmaker herself). She plays Elisabeth, ‘freed' from her six-year-old marriage to find freedom means having an ex-husband intent on reaping revenge through having custody of their child, a series of unfulfilling jobs (because, at 29, she is too old to start a career), the impossibility of fulfilling her childhood dream of becoming a singer-dancer, and the only way out being a second marriage. Freedom exists only as a different form of enslavement.
“In retrospect, A Free Woman was an important precursor of the mid-1970s cycle of American films dealing with the single/divorced/career woman (Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore, An Unmarried Woman, et al.) which, while donating the gift of new-found sexual freedom to its central figures, tended still to provide the old Hollywood values of family and male control as the only possible constructions for a woman's happiness.
“Widely praised on its international release, A Free Woman now appears double-edged (is it being ‘realist' about the status of women, or copping out?)....” --Richard Kwietniowski