In the melodramas, I’m most impressed with his skill and ingenuity with structure. I thought The Marriage of Maria Braun was settling into its main narrative arc four or five different times before realizing that it doesn't have one and was just going to keep plowing ahead, using ellipses and compressions to give its small-scale drama the scope of an epic as well as to force an analytical distance from the action, since you have to continually reorient yourself in the narrative. This structure perfectly expresses Maria’s ruthless social climbing and its mirror image, Germany’s rush toward prosperity and away from history.
On the other hand, Fassbinder's twisty plotting can have an “and then” thinness to it. Fear Eats the Soul takes a pretty familiar forbidden romance set-up and strips every element down to the frankest, most potent version of itself. Then at the halfway point it becomes a different kind of movie for a while, introducing the cruel joke that, for many of the characters, their extreme racism is outweighed by their extreme selfishness. Emmi is relieved but for Ali it’s easier to be rejected than accepted by a world that disgusts him. So the movie shifts into marital drama as the problems move from outside the relationship to inside it. That’s a good idea on paper but the film never lays the groundwork for it so Emmi’s selfishness and Ali’s desperation in the second half kind of come out of nowhere, even though they make sense. As a character Ali winds up less fully realized than Emmi, without as strong a sense of his thought process or what he wants out of the relationship other than kindness. This weakness especially effects the final third of the film because the change in plotting hinges on character-based drama rather than the social melodrama of the rest of the film.
Highlights of the other things I’ve seen include the the stained-glass color lighting of Lola and the disorienting, angular camera movements of Chinese Roulette, though the latter film didn’t work for me overall. I look forward to circling back to the early work, starting tonight with Katzelmacher. I plan on making Matt's prophecy come true:
Matt wrote: ↑Sat Sep 11, 2021 6:38 pmWhat better way to spend the holiday season than with miserable people determined to make everyone around them just as miserable? Get the whole family together over some drinks to watch The Merchant of Four Seasons! Watch Martha with a date! Get the gal pals together to cheer on girlbosses Maria Braun and Petra von Kant! Celebrate the high life with Fox and Veronika Voss!
(as per zedz's above post)
