Review: Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s The BRD Trilogy on Criterion Blu-ray

The trilogy is accorded a series of breathtakingly, resonantly gorgeous transfers by Criterion.

The BRD TrilogyThe films of Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s BRD trilogy pull off a difficult magic trick, feeling timeless and viscerally in the moment. With his supernatural ability to crank out productions at a rapid clip, Fassbinder achieved what Kent Jones describes as a “direct correlation between living and fiction-making”—a quality that’s also evident in Jean-Luc Godard’s early films. These directors worked so fast as to annihilate the distance between inspiration and realization that often governs studio filmmaking. As a result, The Marriage of Maria Braun, Veronika Voss, and Lola are works of many astonishing contradictions, symmetries, parallels, and political and personal reverberations. They are expressions of macro concerns that are wrested from a singular soul.

The Marriage of Maria Braun, Veronika Voss, and Lola collectively chart Germany’s economic resurgence in the wake of the damage it suffered from defeat in World War II. In each film, Fassbinder utilizes a melodramatic template and a distinct cinematic style of the past and imbues them with homegrown political texture—a contrast that serves as a microcosm of his governing obsession. The melodrama competes with the history and social critique, suggesting how culture is used to launder evil. Given the beauty of Fassbinder’s actresses, and the exhilaration of the filmmaker’s formal craftsmanship, it’s very tempting to drink the filmic sensuality in and leave the history to the academics. There’s a portion of Fassbinder that resents this distracting power of pop culture, as he’s authentically enraged by how easily his country could move past the atrocities of the Nazi regime, and there’s another portion that’s enthralled with the accumulative spell of sex, cinema, music, sports, business, bars, and brothels. This contradiction is what gives the BRD trilogy its pulse, and keeps it from slipping into the false sense of retrospection that fossilizes so many historical narratives.

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Maria (Hanna Schygulla), Veronika (Rosel Zech), and Lola (Barbara Sukowa) are all performers who embody the precarious art of surviving as women in a male world. The men of these women’s lives have the power to scam and legislate, rebuilding Germany on the power of the initiatives of Ludwig Erhard, the Minister of Economic Affairs who’s associated with the country’s economic “miracle,” known as the Wirtschaftswunder. During this time, building regulations were eased and commercialism was emphasized, which Fassbinder despairingly equates to a mass selling of souls. Each woman either figuratively or literally prostitutes themselves, and Fassbinder grooves on the inventiveness and power of his protagonists, respecting their ability to bend a chaotic and patriarchal society to their will, though he also ultimately sees them as pawns in a diseased capitalist game. This divide in sentiments, another contradiction that’s inherent in most people and at the root of the challenge of social reform, is often missing from modern and fashionably leftist narratives.

At their simplest, all three films riff on the notion of martyred women living in an impossibly rigged society, sowing plentiful allusions to the films of Douglas Sirk. Sirk’s notion of suburban America as an prison was radical in the 1950s and is perhaps even more so now, given the amnesia and political naïveté of modern pop cinema, but Fassbinder takes this idea to the next level, offering an origin story as to how Germany developed what he sees as a corresponding form of imprisonment. Such a development involves a complex collaboration between men and women that resists easy victim/dominator roleplays, though Veronika, the least powerful of the trilogy’s protagonists, comes closest to fulfilling such a function. However, Veronika’s victimhood is another form of subversion. Based on actress Sybille Schmitz, Veronika is a Nazi-era actress and drug addict, a rumored ex-lover of Goebbels who’s destroyed in the ’50s by the German upper class in an implicit effort to obscure shameful history.

There’s a brilliant moment in Lola in which Fassbinder asserts that we’re not quite playing by Sirk’s rules. Von Bohm (Armen Mueller-Stahl), a Prussian refugee in a blossoming West German city as the new building commissioner, buys a television set for his apartment. Audiences complicit with Fassbinder’s Sirk fanaticism may expect a quotation from the classic moment in All That Heaven Allows in which we see a reflection of a woman’s face framed in a TV set, seemingly trapped in her own privilege. Instead, Fassbinder frames the TV as a little monolith in the middle of the room, pointedly refusing to quote the earlier film because von Bohm doesn’t know that he’s gradually entombing himself, as his infatuation with Lola makes him a slave to the elite who’re breaking building codes and remaking the city. One day, however, von Bohm may watch that set and see the reflection of a sad and compromised man. (Lola, also a riff on The Blue Angel, divorces the von Sternberg film of its masculine self-pity, depicting Lola as a realist and von Bohm as a pious fool and hypocrite.)

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Veronika Voss and Lola are difficult films—hermetic, compacted, and hopeless from the opening frames. Their styles aren’t entirely pleasurable, as Fassbinder’s formalism is far less free in those two films than it is in The Marriage of Maria Braun. Modeled after German expressionism of the 1920s, Veronika Voss is so funereally bright and prismatic that you feel as if the film can cut you. Lola is the opposite: a bright burst of Technicolor debauchery that’s so lurid it’s apocalyptic. In this context, with piggy characters who’re high on their greed, it’s as if Fassbinder is decrying the very carnal power of this seductive color scheme, yet, again, he’s also intensely in love with the primordial powers of the form.

But Veronika Voss and Lola also have sustained sequences in which Fassbinder grants his characters fits of emotion so intense they feel as if they could break the foundation of the filmmaker’s careful constructions. Most notable is Lola’s astonishing and ambiguous performance of “The Fishermen of Capri” once von Bohm has discovered that she’s a prostitute. It’s difficult to tell if her passion springs from spite at von Bohm or sadness that his worship of her has been tarnished or both, though her rendition of this song is so full and sensual and sad that the distinction eventually seems to hardly matter.

The Marriage of Maria Braun, one of Fassbinder’s greatest works, is so unshakeable because the filmmaker’s judgment of Germany takes a back seat to his spellbinding powers as a storyteller; the critique is very present here, too, but it bobs up and down between text and subtext in surprising fashions. The implications of the opening are unmistakable though, as the film begins with a wall adorned with a portrait of Adolf Hitler exploding, cutting short Maria’s wedding. In a matter of seconds, Fassbinder communicates the terror of a conquered society, a terror that’s understood to lurk in Maria even as she evolves from a prostitute to a mistress to a businesswoman controlling a textile plant.

Fassbinder doesn’t reduce his characters here: Maria is at once warm and cold, and the men she takes up with are poignant lost souls who attempt to rejoin their society via commerce—a longing that’s humanized further by the haunting shots of buildings that have been torn to pieces by warfare. Yet their longing is nevertheless dangerous. A second explosion, a reverse deus ex machina, closes the film, killing characters too distracted to see the menace bubbling up in front of them. Tellingly, this happens while a sporting event plays over the radio, the sort of thing that seeks to divert us, then and now, from systemic catastrophe.

Image/Sound

These pristine restorations are visual and aural marvels that underscore the profound aesthetic difference between each film in the BRD trilogy. The Marriage of Maria Braun has a wonderful scruffiness, with vivid flesh tones and attractive grit. Veronika Voss is shot in black and white, which is rendered here with a shrillness that’s purposefully stifling. The whites are so gleaming they threaten to efface the richer comforts of the blacks—a conceit that was evident in the prior Criterion version but is much more pronounced here. Meanwhile, the deep and garish colors of Lola suggest an unholy fusion of Technicolor musicals with gialli, and they pop off the screen here with unprecedented feverishness. Facial textures are superbly detailed in all three films, and grain has been cleaned up but not unnaturally eradicated. The soundtracks remind us that Fassbinder’s ear was exacting as his eye, as little supporting sounds are frequently heightened to establish setting as well as the emotional climates of the characters—nuances that are expertly supported by these mixes.

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Extras

These supplements have been ported over from Criterion’s 2003 DVD edition with no updates, though this package is so rich and exhaustive it hardly matters, offering a couple of semesters’ worth of context pertaining to German film history, German social upheavals, and the multifaceted life of Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Firstly, each production features an audio commentary—by filmmaker Wim Wenders and cinematographer Michael Ballhaus (on The Marriage of Maria Braun), film critic and author Tony Rayns (on Veronika Voss), and film scholar Christian Braad Thomsen (on Lola)—that justifies the price of admission alone. This mixture of filmmakers with erudite critics offers a variety of practical and theoretical perspectives that illuminate the creations of these films and their subsequent social impact from all sorts of angles. Complementing these commentaries is a conversation from 2003 between author and curator Laurence Kardish and film editor Juliane Lorenze, and a booklet featuring a great essay by critic Kent Jones, who elaborates on Fassbinder’s idea of his career as a “house,” and production histories by author Michael Töteberg.

Other supplements fill in the personal history of the BRD trilogy’s various artists. There are interviews from 2003 with all three leading ladies, Hanna Schygulla, Rosel Zech, and Barbara Sukowa, in which they testify to Fassbinder’s humanism as well as to his propensity for manipulation and tyranny. Those elements of the filmmaker are illuminated as well in Hans Günther Pflaum’s I Don’t Just Want You to Love Me, a feature-length documentary on the man’s life and career, while “Life Stories: A Conversation with R.W. Fassbinder” allows him to speak for himself. There’s even a program here, “Dance with Death,” that discusses the inspiration for Lola, Ufa studios star Sybille Schmitz, as well as a variety of other conversations. Which is to say that this collection is, in itself, a house.

Overall

Fassbinder’s trilogy is accorded a series of breathtakingly, resonantly gorgeous transfers, with the older extras still cutting the mustard as supreme examinations of a rich and difficult epic.

Score: 
 Cast: Hanna Schygulla, Klaus Löwitsch, Ivan Desny, Gisela Uhlen, Elisabeth Trissenaar, Gottfried John, Hark Bohm, George Byrd, Rosel Zech, Hilmar Thate, Cornelia Froboess, Annemarie Düringer, Doris Schade, Erik Schumann, Barbara Sukowa, Armin Mueller-Stahl, Mario Adorf, Matthias Fuchs, Helga Feddersen, Karin Baal, Ivan Desny, Elisabeth Volkmann, Karl-Heinz von Hassel  Director: Rainer Werner Fassbinder  Screenwriter: Rainer Werner Fassbinder  Distributor: The Criterion Collection  Running Time: 339 min  Rating: NR  Year: 1979 – 1981  Release Date: July 9, 2019  Buy: Video

Chuck Bowen

Chuck Bowen's writing has appeared in The Guardian, The Atlantic, The AV Club, Style Weekly, and other publications.

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