the marriage of maria braun (w&d fassbinder. w. pea fröhlich, peter märthesheimer)

Fassbinder’s rambling movie is gloriously chaotic, barging its way through the German postwar years like a drunk stocking up in a supermarket at closing time. Everything happens fast, then it doesn’t, then it does again. Maria is married! Her husband is dead! She starts sleeping with a GI! She’s pregnant! Her husband is alive! She’s not pregnant! She’s a businesswoman! Her husband is in prison! She’s sleeping with her boss! He’s free! He’s gone! He’s back! Two hours of seismic narrative beats and zooms. It’s an erratic but entertaining journey, which offers a commentary on modern West Germany which is hard to follow, so many years later. (Does anyone remember Helmut Schmidt, whose photo occupies the closing frame?) However, the sheer energy of the filmmaking seems to compensate for the spinning compass of the narrative needle.

The opening sequence, in bombed, post-war Germany, tallies with a biography of Nico I have just finished, and strangely, as my father flirts with death, (successfully keeping it at bay for now), I am given a window on the life my grandmother would have lead in the aftermath of the war, the life my father was born into. The generations that lived through the complete destruction of most German and Polish cities are ebbing away. Someone born today is not far short of a century from those times. (I was born in ’66, so the equivalent retrospective time journey from my birth would take me to 1886, a date which seems to belong to another consciousness altogether.) Fassbinder captures those years, the desperation they provoked and the way the drive for survival overrode pre-war’s social codes and quaint bourgeois morality. He relishes in the chaos and energy that those years inspired, with Maria Braun becoming a rambunctious anti-heroine, stepsister to the desperate Christa Päffgen. 

lola (w&d fassbinder, w. peter märthesheimer, pea fröhlich)

We were ten minutes late for the start of the movie. Caught up in the exaggerated emotional morass that every creature, from newt to orang utang, occasionally finds itself stuck in. Fassbinder's colours, as a result, were perfect. Lit with deep melodramatic shades, suggesting a land where everything is overblown and heightened. The pacing of the storytelling was similar, a kind of hop-skip-and-a-jump approach, breathy scenes accumulating like cumulonimbus, the narrative a set of dominoes lined up and falling over, one after another.

All of which created a cinematic tone which did not feel entirely comfortable, pitched somewhere between soap opera and social realism. However, this slight awkwardness or discomfort was perfect for our state of mind, which might not have been able to cope with anything too measured. The film billowed along like a schooner, its more laconic social critique occasionally peeping through like the moon on a scuddy, clouded night. It never felt close to being unimpeachably brilliant filmmaking, but the director's spicy palate always had sufficient to keep the viewer along for the ride, wanting to learn Lola's ultimate fate, wanting the hypocritical mask to be ripped off post-war Germany's complacent face.