March 2022: A great anti-war movie, Murakami in film, Roumanian film, Karel Reisz, Fassbinder, Jarmusch, Lincoln, and Will Smith

March 2022

The 40-part AppleTV series Lincoln’s Dilemma is engrossing and informative on so many levels; while fully acknowledging the pain many Black Americans today feel in the presence of statuary or landmarks that claim Lincoln as the great emancipator - arguing vehemently and correctly that Blacks earned their own emancipation, through their years of suffering and their uprisings during the Civil War and their valiant service in the still-biased Union army - the series recognizes the great accomplishment of Lincoln and, most important, his evolution over time, over the course of his presidency - initially only pledging to restore the union w/out any particular view on slavery or emancipation, gradually, in part through his own suffering and loss, feeling bold enough to use emancipation in order to move the war toward its conclusion and hold the union of states - and up to the time of his death by which point he recognized the importance of emancipation regardless of political or military expedience. Told with excellent use of period photographs and documents, with lots of voice-over readings of key statements by Lincoln, those who knew him, those who suffered in the war and in the confederacy, and in particular Douglass, who spurred Lincoln on like a living conscience, though they met face to face only three times. The series is narrated by a collection of Lincoln schools, historians, and journalists, all of them on point and clear, giving me faith that there must be many great young historians at work today and teaching their craft and knowledge to today’s generation of college students - a really impressive group effort. Jacqueline Olive and Barak Goodman direct, based on the book Abe by David S. Reynolds.

Elem Klimov’s Come and See (1985) has to be the best war, or actually anti-war, film I’ve ever seen - why it’s so far under the radar is a bit mysterious and must have something to do w/ its being one of the few great films come of the post-Stalin era Soviet Union (another being the much more recent Beanpole). Come and See (yes, bad title) is in the tradition of All Quiet on the Western Front (the first anti-war film I ever saw) as we follow a young man’s induction into military life and armed combat. The setting both geographical and temporal is a little muddy at first, at least to this American viewer, but I see by the end that it was set during World War II and involves an small Soviet military unit taking up arms against the invading Nazi army - always a morally confusing moment, as it seems strange to be on the side of the Soviets, but an enemy of my enemy is a friend. Apparently it’s set in Belarus, and the film goes through what feel like several “acts”: initially the young man is essentially impressed into the Soviet Army to the horror of his parents who need him on the small family farm. He is taken in by an Army unit on the march, and all seems well and jovial for a time - it’s like a camp!- and on a mission he encounters a young woman whom he seems to fall for (the film, like many Soviet films, is quite chaste); suddenly they’re under aerial attack - vivid, realist, scary. He later makes his way back to his family farm, which in now deserted - everyone’s been killed by the Germans. On he goes - the next “movement” being the appropriation from a farmer of a dairy cow - an incredible sequence that ends in despair. And then the most amazing part - a segment of may 20 minutes, maybe longer, of the German overthrow of and occupation of a small town - just an astonishing sequence of cruelty and brutality, that never feels gratuitous - just horrifying; I know of no other sequence like this. (The young woman reappears, somewhat changed.) So the film is 2+ hours and it’s without any redeeming humor or sentiment; insofar as it’s a justification of Soviet brutality (to its own), to hell with it, but insofar as it’s a filmmakers view of the horrors of war, it’s must-see. 

The quirkiness and oddity of Haruki Murakami’s fiction has at last become evident to contemporary filmmakers (years ago I tried to persuade friend director AW to adapt Wild Sheep Chase to an American setting), with the latest venture being Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s Drive My Car (2021); should it be 3 hours long? Probably not (we watched in the 3 one-hour segments, making it much like a miniseries) but in any format it’s an excellent film about a theater director coping with the death of his wife and with several realizations about his wife’s infidelity, all of which lead to surprising outcomes and developments across the span of this epic; much of the film has do w/ the director’s taking on a multi-language production of Uncle Vanya (another fave among filmmakers, for obvious reasons), which at first looks as if it will become one of worst productions ever staged but surprisingly it becomes a beautiful project that touches on various aspects of the lives of the actors (and others). The highlight-reel segment is the long car ride in which the lead actor in the play gives the director (Hidetoshi Nishijima) a spill of info about his late wife, most of which surprises us, some of which surprises him, all of which may or may not be a lie.  Definitely an intelligent film; the slow pacing and lack of high melodrama will mean it’s not for all viewers, but patience pays off - the film becomes better as the plot moves along and we become accustomed to its pace, so to speak. I’d like to read or re-read the source story. 

Radu Jude’s 2016 film from Romania, Scarred Hearts (the title is awkward, at least in English) is a beautiful if painful medical odyssey, as we follow a young man (early 20s) in 1935 Romania as he enters a TB asylum; the care he receives may have been adequate in its day but from our vantage looks brutal and ineffective: essentially the well-meaning doctor punctures the patient’s stomach to siphon off infectious pus - extremely painful - the puts the patient in a body cast, essentially making him immobile for months - with obvious physical (and mental) deterioration. The actor portrays a well-known (in Romania) poet and novelist of the 30s, Max Bletcher, whose words open each segment of the film; it’s obvious to all viewers that Bletcher (played as “Emmanuel” Lucian Teodor Rus) is dying - but over the course of his demise he falls in love w/ a young former patient who spends time at the facility. Obviously this film evokes Magic Mountain, but this is hardly in the same social (or intellectual, or medical) orbit - as the life of the patients is painful and difficult, there are several riotous episodes, lots of carousing, much open, even encouraged, often painful sex, some anti-Semitism directed at Emmanuel - it’s by no means a resort or a place anyone would ever choose to stay for a minute. His well-off Jewish family members do the best they can for “Manu,” but there’s only so much that medical science of the day can do; his awkward journey at the end to Hungary for more extensive supposedly helpful surgery is horrifying and sorrowful to watch. The whole film is photographed beautifully as a series of long takes from a still (or slowly approaching) camera; I don’t think there’s a single close-up in the whole film - especially strange in that most of the dialog is spoken by actors immobilized and on their backs facing the ceiling. In short, a unique, troubling, yet powerful film. 

Don’t ask me to tell you the plot of Harry and Jack Williams’s series, The Tourist (2022, HBO) as it is almost impossible to recount let alone relate all of the twists and turns, many surprising, most of which make sense - I mean, yes, you could log off saying “that could never happen,” but throw yourself into the unlikelihood and go for the ride, which is a lot of fun, often laugh-out-loud funny, and engrossing - right through to the conclusion which leans hopefully forward to a 2nd season. Roughly, this (poorly named) series follow a man driving in the Outback who is pursued he knows not why and, following a brutal crash, has lost all of his memory; over the course of the 6 episodes we learn that the is being pursued by gangsters - or maybe he is a gangster? - and aided by a beautiful woman whom he may (or may not?) have known her in his previous life and pursued by the Australian cops - incompetent? just inexperienced? or in on the scheme? You get the picture, or maybe you don’t, but it’s fun and engaging all the way. 

Karel Reisz’s Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960) still stands as one of the great films of its era, capturing the look and mood of post-war (I think the story was set sa 1948?) London - shot in industrial Nottingham, every moment - from the first moment of men like automatons in some sort of factory to the close overlooking a once-pastoral hillside now scarred by housing developments - dark and oppressive; as with the other Angry Young Man films, this one focuses on an angry Arthur, played well by Albert Finney, fun-loving but ultimately destructive, cruel, self-centered, dreaming of a better life but doing nothing bring that about, full of hate toward all authority figures, belligerent and unfaithful to women and to his “pals” - yet, somehow, we feel, what choice does he have? At least he’s full of life and not shut off from life his fellow oppressed workers. The film is based on a novel by Alan Sillitoe - who also wrote the screenplay - and it will of course remind most viewers of The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner, based on a Sillitoe story - probably a better film because of a more rounded central character and its beautiful, sorrowful ending - whereas SN&SM ends abruptly and ironically in a way that doesn’t do justice to much of the rich material. 

Many takes on Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s vast and diverse collection of works, some great some just eccentric, and one of the latter would be Chinese Roulette (1976). It starts as a surprisingly “French” drawing-room comedy as a husband and wife each set out for a weekend tryst w/ mistress or lover (the lead character was supposedly heading for a meeting in Osloa) when both couples converge at the same getaway, a “mansion” that one of the couples owns. These are 4 sophisticates so rather than blow up in anger they accept the switch of couples and engage in smirch civilized if repressed chatter and recreations, such as an on-going chess match. The movie never becomes what we viewers were led to believe: it’s not Cosi nor Midsummer Night’s Dream - it’s just - I don’t even know what; the 4 adults (and one of their kids who’s the most malevolent of all) begin to engage in some weird party games including the eponymous roulette but for me it was impossible to follow the rules of significance of that game nor of any of the other distractions. By the end I was just puzzled: Who are these weirdos, including the household staff, one of whom is writing some sort of Nietzsche-like profundities and absurdities, so who is he and who cares? WMF seems to have lost interest in the film aside from its being an opportunity for shots from many odd angles and perspectives; otherwise, it was probably a quick one-off for this highly productive filmmaker but one that would fall at or near the bottom of his list, and mine.

Jim Jarmusch’s Stranger Than Paradise (1984) is great to watch today, a time capsule of roadside life - America looked so different then, in some ways much more industrial and grimy and in other respects vacant, untouched - and of life in a dingy apartment in Brooklyn, now probably renting or a condo in the millions. The story - classic motif, a stranger comes to town - involves the unexpected arrival in a young man whose 16-year-old cousin suddenly appears at his doorstep, a new arrival fro Hungary. As we watch her hang around with cousin Will and his pal Eddie it becomes obvious that they’re going nowhere - petty grifters, aimless - and that she’ll do all right in America: she’s attractive, animated, and she picks everything up fast. The plot, thin as it may be )(which is ok in the totally non-=commercial film0, involves a road trip to Cleveland and an extended trip to Florida, where they boys blow their $ at the track; the end is deliberately open and inconclusive, much like a Joyce story. The cinematography, b/w, a series of scenes in which the camera is nearly still and we are allowed to absorb the scene in detail (I think these are called master shots - what’s unusual is that this film is composed solely of such shots). All of these shots help us understand the context of the time and place of these characters - so distant today! - and some are beautiful in their own right and hilarious, as for example the long shot - 2 minutes? - of the threesome with one picked-up friend (interested in the girl) as we watch them watch what seems to be a Kung Fu movie. And almost forgot to mention the terrific, highly dissonant, score for a string quartet (I think), mostly in the 2nd and 3rd acts of the film, plus the added bonus of clips from Screamin’ Jay Hawkins’s Got a Spell on You, terrific performer froth 50s little known today (nice touch making the Hungarian teen her champion). Really nice debut (?) film from JJ, who’s gone on to a great career in non-Hollywood cinema, about as far from the studio system as one can get. 

King Richard (Reynaldo Marcus Green, 2021) gets it about right, as far as I can tell from following the Williams sisters and their rise to stardom over the year. We’re left with a suitably ambivalent feeling about their father/coach, Richard Williams, in Will Smith’s (deserved) Oscar role: yes, RW deserves praise for his raising his 5 daughters in a wholesome and loving manner, and esp for doing so in the challenging environment of Compton/LA, where he is threatened and beaten by thugs who harass his daughters Venus and Serena. His faith in their abilities and his intelligent coaching and managing their careers - despite so many potential pitfalls and such hostile and racist reception by so many in and on the circuit. That said, it’s not hard to sympathize with the neighbor who suspects him of child abuse, as he is extremely hard on his daughters and a martinet on certain aspects of family discipline (his wife, Aunjanue Ellis,  is a good counterweight, and I loved the scenes where she told him off - the only person who could possibly do so). RA knew that his daughters would become stars - but we also have to recognize that the world is full of parents who overestimate the brilliance of their kids - and to an outsider he would seem like one of those, at least at first. The film culminates in the ultimate success of the girls, Venus in particular - and does not even touch on the issues of what about the other girls in the family? If memory serves, at least one did not come to a good end. I would not say the film is “scrubbed clean,” as we definitely see some of the flaws in RW’s system and his confrontational behavior, but it was obviously made w/ the cooperation of the W family so it was definitely not going to cross any lines. All told, worth watching, esp for tennis fans and for those curious about what spurred Smith on to such hostility at the awards ceremony: he’d been primed for anger, 

Elliot's Watching Week of 8-1-21: Ronan Farrow, Fassbinder, J.K. Rowling, and a classic Western

 Elliot’s Watching - Week of 8-1-21: Catch & Kill, Despair, Strike, and 7 Men

Ronan Farrow’s 6-part documentary, Catch and Kill (HBO), is pretty much as it says: The Podcast Tapes. If you’ve listened to the podcasts (I hadn’t) there’s not much value added in this cinema/documentary version - almost all of the significant footage consists of the interviews that formed the basis of RF’s reporting on the Havey Weinstein, rapist. That said: This is still a great series for a lot of reasons: RF’s intrepid and brave reporting, the nefarious nature of HW which no doubt was well known and quietly tolerated across the whole entertainment industry, the cowardice of NBC news in ordering RF to kill the report and walking away from it, the boldness of the New Yorker in choosing to stick with RF and to run the story after scrupulous fact-checking, and the frightening attempts to intimidate RF and to dirty him up in fruitless efforts to kill the report or tarnish its veracity. I have nothing but praise for RF, a guy who could have chosen a much easier pathway in life, could have gotten all kinds of jobs and opportunities based on his connection to Hollywood/cultural elite, but who chose to pursue journalism and not in some half-assed, celebrity-kissing way but through the rigors or serious and dangerous reporting over many years and the extreme difficulty of writing a nonfiction book as well. We can see from these recordings that he’s a terrific interviewer and willing to push and probe and follow up on leads to get to the truth. And the truth - the power the HW wielded in the industry and the sense that his criminal behavior was so widely tolerated and the a major media outlet could be bullied by him and his minions into silence - all quite astonishing and depressing, but many kudos to RF for pursuing this path and bringing the truth to light. 

Seldom, maybe never, have such an array of illuminati and the talented been brought together in such a dismal failure as the 1978 film Despair: based on the novel by Nabokov (high literary props), adapted (I’ll say!) for the screen by Tom Stoppard (higher props), directed by Rainer Warner Fassbinder (first English-language film), starring Dirk Bogarde (art-film star) - and finally what a mess. First of all, Nabokov’s novel (1934) is ridiculously inappropriate for a film; like most of his work, this novel was a vehicle for VN to show that he’s smarter than his readers, knows more languages and can write well in any, and he’s a master at creating thoroughly unlikable narrators - all of which says to me, lousy movie. Then, how did Stoppard get involved? He seems to have had no sense in how to build a dramatic plot. The plot such as it is involves a German  Hermann (Bogarde) in Prague (?) on a business trip encounters on the street a man who looks like his double; he concocts a plan to “murder himself” in order to, I guess, start a new life under the now dead man’s ID. Potentially good - but Stoppard was unwilling to break the bonds of VN’s meandering narrative and make this an exciting story of murder and doom. Not much happens; the killing itself is ridiculous; and the film (not sure about the novel, I didn’t finish reading it) ends in some postmodern nonsense: I’m just a character in a movie, wearing for freedom, blah blah. as for Fassbinder, he seems to have been lost in the English language, as the speeches are wooden and strange without being moving or provocative; he does seem interested in the somewhat louche aspects of the novel, in particular the failed artist who hangs around with Hermann’s wife - a chance it seems for RWF to peer, as he so often has in much better films, at the underworld and the eccentricities of temper and tempest in the art scene. How that all hangs together, what type of despair could motivate or drive Hermann to kill an innocent man - no answers lie in this film. Despair? Disaster. 

First season (Lethal) of the British (based on J.K. Rowling detective-novel series - I guess she needed the money?) C.B. Strike breaks no new ground - private eye, wounded war veteran, setting up his business in a rented walkup, takes on temp as his secretary, she thrills to and excels in the business as the form a good working partnership with of course the tension being do they fall for each other or remain simply professional colleagues - we’ve seen this before (think: X-files for ex.) - but it’s reasonably entertaining, as Strike ushered to find out whether a London supermodel’s death was suicide or murder and as of course it’s gonna be murder: Who dunit? Like so many detective or police procedurals, the probability of the entire search and research is based more on plot convenience than on any possible reality, so if you can acknowledge from the top that all the stupid clues and leads don’t really matter, that this is a series about a developing relationship/partnership, then it’s OK if not great. If nothing else, Rowling is a total all-star at developing a plot into a series, so this may be worth watching beyond Season 1, though I probably won’t persist. Also worth noting that many of the key lines/important dialog is delivered in a mumbled South London accent that was extremely hard to discern, at least for this American viewer - but if you get only 80 percent of what’s said you’ll get enough to follow along. 

To my chagrin, I’ve never been a fan of Westerns; as a kid, I couldn’t follow the plot lines and never understood the whole mythos of the West. Who were these people in covered wagons, where did they come from, where were they going? Why was everyone so afraid of the “Indians”? Who were the sheriffs and deputies and other “lawmen”? So I’ve pretty much ignored this genre of film except for the absolute highlights such as The Searchers and High Noon. But this week a watched a 1956 Western. Budd Boetticher’s Seven Men from Now,  that’s not on the 100 greatest list by any means, but it totally held my interest and attention - proving once more that a B-movie that accomplishes its goals is better to watch than an A-movie that falls short. Without going through the whole plot line - which holds together far better than most B-movie scripts (thanks, writer Burt Kennedy), it involves a theft of gold from a Wells Fargo branch, an attack in which a woman clerk is killed - and she’s the wife of a out-of-favor lawman, who proceed to search for the 7 robbers who killed her; in the process, he’s called upon to help a totally feckless wagoner who’s heading for California with his young wife. En route, among those whom they cross, is frightening, evil guy - the young Lee Marvin! More than most Westerns, this one game me the sense of the risks and difficulty (and sometimes stupidity) of heading out in wagon without knowing the requisite skills. You get from this film a real sense of the dangerous landscape and the need for grit and independence to get cross-country, let alone to succeed in the West. Among other notable aspects, the score (Henry Vars) captures the mood of the film without overwhelming us with bathos, and of particular note it’s one of the few films of the era,  I think, in which the protagonist seems to understand and sympathize with the soon-to-be oppressed native cultures. It’s not the greatest Western of all time, but it’s an entertaining diversion that carries both a wallop and a message. 

Berlin Alexanderplatz as a groundbreaking 13-part narrative for TV - and its woeful epilogue

By any measure Rainer Werner Fassbinder's 13-part (plus epilogue) series, Berlin Alexanderplatz was ground-breaking in 1980 and has been hugely influential in charting the way for a highly intelligent and literary long-form narrative for television (today, streaming). BA is the antecedent of such long-form, character-driven dramas as The Sopranos, The Wire, House of Cards - the list could go on. RWF's epic, based on the 1929 novel by Alfred Doblin, does look a little dated, of course - some of the voice-overs and title screens look more '60s than '80s, but in its scope and ambition alone it stands well ahead of its time. The series is set in the heart of postwar Berlin in 1928, a time of huge unemployment, no social services, an economy still reeling after the war, and a time of political unrest, w/ right- and left-wing organizations vying for power and public attention. Checking back on my notes from when I read Doblin's novel 5 or so years back, I can see that RWF hued closely to the novel - except in his free-wheeling 2-hour epilogue, which is largely RWF's vision. At the center of every moment of the series (and novel) is Franz Biberkopf (Gunter Lamprecht); the series begins w/ his exit from prison, where he has served 4 years (!!) for the murder of his wife. Throughout, he remains an entirely unsympathetic character: cruel and violent toward women, a petty criminal, full of self-pity. And yet - we see him as part of his time and place, a victim of an indifferent society that offers no help or hope to people like him, no way to get his life on track: We see him for a while try to make a living in sales (newspapers, pornography, shoe strings!), with no success, so he's of course drawn to violent crime and to "pimping" - even of his seemingly beloved Mieze. You can't root (or even hope) for this guy, but you can's stop watching his demise. Interestingly, in both book and miniseries, there is a not a bit of back story on Franz (nor on any other character, for that matter). The filmmaking itself is largely convention - a social-realist drama that could well have been played on stage; RWF does a great job creating a visual (and audio) reality - nearly the entire film shot in hues of brown and orange; in the very few moments when the plot diverts from the urban setting, the bright colors or an ordinary summer day are shocking and astonishing. The musical score involves "theme" music for most of the major characters and a period re-creation using some 20s jazz motifs. All of which brings us to the epilogue - where RWF breaks ranks and shows his own interpretation of Fran's fate - which involves a journey through an afterlife and a search for his murdered girlfriend (and perhaps for vengeance?) - and I can only say that this part of the series seems pretentious and labored and is at times so gruesome that I had to skip ahead rather than watch more naked bodies being dismembered - so, viewer, beware.

Fassbinder's first great film, groundbreaking in many ways: Fox and His Friends

Fox and His Friends (1976) stands as probably Rainer Werner Fassbinder's first great film, groundbreaking in many ways and a film that established RWF as a master at staging and composition - and also a multiple threat, director, writer, lead actor. In particular, the film is groundbreaking as one of the first honest and non-exploitative films about gay culture - as almost all of the lead characters are gay, and we see that they are flamboyant, catty, vindictive, jealous, spiteful, in other words pretty much like characters/couples in any movie. You could imagine the entire film done with hetero characters, and it could be pretty much the same - though in depicting a gay culture there's a constant element of danger and marginalization that gives the film a sharp edge. In essence, the plot involves RWF's lead character, the eponymous Fox, a working-class guy from a family troubled by alcoholism who wins a huge prize in a lottery and from that point forward is taken in by a set of artistic and wealthy homosexual mean and painfully exploited by a man with whom he, supposedly, falls in love. It's awful to watch as this so-called partner takes advantage of Fox's naivety, and in particular how he humiliates Fox for what he considers his uncouth manners and plebeian taste. The film flirts with the idea of a Pygmalion story - the wealthy sophisticate bringing culture and manners to the working-class beloved - bt RWF is far to shrewd and honest to build such a fake drama: We quickly suffer with Fox as he suffers condescension and humiliation. Pretty much every scene is beautifully staged - and its hard to underestimate how important RWF's blocking can be; like most of his movies, this one verges on the edge of stage-play, and in lesser hands it would feel static and "talky," but RWF uses each scene to show us part of a world and a culture, without the dialog or the movements (of characters and of camera) ever feeling forced or unnatural. The great scenes include shopping for furniture and clothing, the transformation of the new apartment, the party to celebrate the new digs, visits to the small and discrete gay bar, the long scene on the ramps in a parking garage, and the famous ending scene in what appears to be a subway concourse (though I wonder why there's so little foot traffic), and many others. Many, perhaps most, of RWF's great films are about woman protagonists; this is a rarity in the canon - though we'll see throughout many of his staple of actors - and well worth watching.

An early film shows some signs of Fassbinder's genius

Katzelmacher, from 1969, was one of the early works of the prolific filmmaker Rainer Werner Fassbinder (director, screenwriter, actor - as in many of his films) and by no means his best, but it shows his emerging talent and some of the cinematic skill that he later developed into some fine dramas and melodrama. Like much of his later work, Katzelmacher (I looked it up: the title is loosely translated as Troublemakers, but a literal translation would be Cat-fuckers!) is deliberately stagey: It feels like a series of snapshots or blackout scenes of interaction among the, I think, 9 main characters. They also show RWF's genius for staging. He was obviously working here on a limited budget, so the sets are often bare and many of the longer scenes are staged with the characters in front of the stucco wall of an apartment building, shoulder to shoulder leaning against or perched on a railing, looking straight ahead and making no eye contact w/ the other characters. The weird staging gives us a sense of the emptiness of the lives of these characters, none of whom seems to have any career or aspiration, other then sex with one another - often for pay - smoking, drinking. The film appears to be going nowhere for quite some time - perhaps recalled a Beckett play or more likely the deliberately stilted staging of a Cassavetes or early Godard film - until about 30 minutes in a new character appears (one of the main tropes of narration: A Stranger Comes to Town), a Greek "guest worker," who stirs up hatred and animosity and sexual jealousy and rivalry among all of the characters. The movie never becomes overtly polemical, but of course there are political implications even more resonant with us today than 50 years ago. The one hang-up, however, is that all of the characters seem too old for their parts - and not sufficiently menacing; no doubt RWF was working on a shoestring w/ fellow film students - you play with the cards you've got - but if anyone were to remake the film or stage it as a play you'd want these Katzelmacher to be scary and brutal. Here, they seem just feckless.

The strange and offbeat success of Fassbinder's Lola

One of Rainer Werner Fassbinder's last films, Lola (1981), is presented as a remake/update of Joseph von Sternberg's classic Dietrich classic, The Blue Angel (which has been adapted/updated elsewhere as well, such as in a novel by Francine Prose). I have to rely on my shaky memory of Blue Angel (funny how the title is reversed in the name of the current Met Opera lead singer in Porgy & Bess), but it seems to me that RWF doesn't update the original - he reverses it. In Blue Angel an elderly, strait-laced, "respectable" university professor goes into a cabaret/night club where he is mesmerized by Dietrich's performance, leading to his degradation, humiliation, and ultimate ruin. In the RWF update, the eponymous Lola is much more of an active, scheming presence. As in the original, this version depicts a 40-something civil servant, newly arrived in this small West German city not long after the war (the 1950s it seems) to serve as the new building commissioner; a straight-arrow, he's an immediate threat to the corrupt builder-developer and to his cronies in the government. They devise a plan to bring the straight-lace to ruin, and Lola (Barbara Sukowa) agrees to meet the commissioner and seduce him; they meet outside of the club, and he's smitten, and sees Lola as a sweet innocent: on their first date the visit a rural church, kneel in the pews, and sing hymns!). Only later does a co-worker, who wants the commissioner to know the truth, is he led to the nightclub where he sees Lola perform and learns that she's not only a chanteuse but a prostitute as well. At that point his mind falls apart, but further plot developments, which I won't reveal, leaves Lola in charge at the end. Most who see the film will remember Lola's riotous performances in the nightclub and the commissioner (Armen Mueller-Stahl) losing his mind and his bearings. What's most striking of all is how RWF depicts the whole movie against type: it's not at all noir, dark, gloomy as is the original, but it's filmed in almost lurid tropical color (the commissioner's office in city hall is done in all bright hues), w/ odd decor such as a line-up of dolls and stuffed animals in Lola's den, and with a classical score so out of keeping w/ the mood of the film as to work beautifully by keeping us always on the verge of disruption. RWF also includes a few touches that remind us of Germany emerging from the time of war: many of the characters, including the commissioner, have either served in the war or lost a spouse in the war; there are signs all around of war damage (broken and shattered walls), so we see the need for new construction as a necessary and inevitable post-war force; he also shows us some signs of the nascent West German economy, comic in its limitations - such as a new TV set that someday may be able to get not just 1 but 2 channels! - all told, a strange and strangely successful movie, all playing against type.

Fassbinder's strange remake of an American melodrama about inter-racial love

Rainer Werner Fassbinder's Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (1974) was one of his first melodramas and is closely modeled on the Douglas Sirk tearjerker All that Heaven Allows (which I know only through its Todd Haynes remake, Far From Heaven). Fassbinder's remake is, like all of his films that I know of, odd and strange in many ways. Both the original and RWF's Ali are about a white woman who falls in love with a black man and suffers from social ostracism as a result. In the original, as far as I know or recall, the black man w/ whom the woman falls in love is her gardener; though not of the same social set as she, he's a serious and dignified man (with an interest in the arts) and is of about her age; also, she's reeling from the pain of her unsuccessful marriage, as her husband leads a not-so-secret double life. RWF's Ali differs in many regards, most notably that Ali is a good 20 years younger than the woman (Emmi), she is widowed, and she is not particularly attractive nor is she well off (perhaps a little more so than Ali, but she's no obvious mark or catch). So right from the start this movie feels odd: Why would an older (i.e., at least 50, parent of three adult children) woman walk into a seedy bar to take shelter from the rain, and, if she did so, why would she agree to let one of the men drinking there walk her home, then invite him to her apartment, encourage him to spend the night in he spare room, which leads to sex and, surprisingly, to an enduring relationship? It makes no sense - nor does it make sense to others in the movie. Ali is a tall, handsome guy, an immigrant from Morocco who speaks a childishly awkward German - we can see what draws her to him, though, but not the reverse. In any event, the world turns against Emmi: he neighbors, her co-workers, and especially her children - and she endures social ostracism and harassment on every front. She stands by her man, and he by her, up to a point. But over time, the hostility diminishes - RWF doesn't really attempt to explain or account for this softening; he never makes Ali more than a helpful stud - but as the social ostracism eases Ali begins to play the field, resurrecting an affair he'd been having with the barmaid (the bar in which much of the movie takes place is a hangout for Ali and other Moroccan immigrants), so RWF pulls our sympathy away from Ali as well as from Emmi: Perhaps he'd been playing her all along? In some ways, this movie feels really contemporary, as we today are far more aware than we were in the 70s of the plight and acceptance (or not) of African immigrants in Europe and the U.S.; in other ways, the movie feels quite old-school, w/ it's almost cliched portrayal of a Town Without Pity star-crossed romance: It's all too obvious which are the good guys and which are the oafs, but what does keep our interest is the edginess of the film: What's in it for Emmi? For Ali? Why do their family members and friends turn against them? What brings them around, in the end?

Some great acting but not much drama per se in Fassbinder's Petra van Kant

Rainer Werner Fassbinder's 1972 film, The Bitter Tears of Petra van Kant, feels much like an intense psychodrama - and in fact I was not surprised to see in a note that it was initially a play - as it has a tight cast of characters (6 think, but only three play major roles and one of the three has a silent omnipresence) - but it's amazing how much topical variety and abundance RWF accomplishes in this film. Although there's only one setting - Petra's studio apartment - the decor is so odd and rich that we're constantly getting new and different perspectives on the characters and the (limited) action; especially notable is the wall-sized blowup of a baroque painting that seemingly depicts a male orgy (also notable, the various female nude figurines used as bodies for fashion shoots). The plot such as it is involves the eponymous Petra (Margit Carstensen, in the performance of a lifetime) who is middle-aged, divorced or widowed, desperately trying to look younger (several wigs throughout), trying to break into the fashion industry (with some success, as it happens), seriously alcoholic, who begins a lesbian relationship with a young woman (Karin) of tragic background (parents dead in murder suicide), played well by Hanna Schygulla, and the maidservant, a silent Irm Herman in some kind of love-triangle. From the start, we dislike Petra, in particular as we see her rail at her hapless servant - whom we also does a lot of the technical fashion-display work (painting images, draping clothing) for Petra, while receiving no credit and being verbally abused and humiliated. Over the course of the film, Petra's relationship w/ Karin breaks apart - Karin tosses Petra aside as soon as a better option becomes available; we hate her - but we hate Petra even more. There's a long tradition of "Petras" in opera and drama, middle-aged women involved with a much younger love and tragically aware that time is not in their favor (see for ex. Die Rosenkavalier) - but usually the older woman is the one with whom we sympathize; not here. I was surprised to learn that RWF was inspired by the melodramatic films of Sirk as he composed this (and some other) films; I see the lavish 50s look of Sirk throughout the film for sure, but I don't at all see the melodrama. In fact, there's no drama per se: The characters to not evolve, there is no collision of forces, no dramatic turnaround, just a gradual dissolution into drink and invective and violence, foreshadowed from the outset and leading to the inevitable (though I won't divulge the specifics) conclusion.

A fine movie that's a story of a life against a historical background - The Marriage of Maria Braun

Rainer Werner Fassbinder's The Marriage of Maria Braun (1979) is a great movie of a type rarely done successfully today, a story of a life, across a background of historical events and culturally transformations, much like a novel, told in a straightforward narrative manner but w/ some inventive touches of style and vision, starting w/ Maria Braun's marriage ceremony, interrupted by a bomb explosion in the first seconds of the movie - a great shock, with echoes throughout the film. Maria marries Hermann during WWII, in an unnamed German city - and we see the rubble and destruction all around - in this and in many later segments. Maria apparently knew her husband for only a short time, and their marriage lasted just a day or two before he was called back to action - and then declared missing in action. Throughout the first "act" of the movie Maria searches for him, which entails joining many other women at a train depot, walking around wearing a placard asking if anyone knows the whereabouts of Hermann Braun. I could, but I won't, go through the whole plot, but suffice to say there are many transformative events, as Maria post war takes a position in an office of a company selling some kind of parts or machinery and, along w/ the company, she rises from extreme poverty and becomes quite wealthy into the 50s - but at great personal cost - symbolic of course both of the recovery of the German economy post-war and the ways in which capitalism and the world of commerce can wreck families and relationships. Striking for its absence throughout - there is no sense of German guilt about the war and about the Nazi era, much less about the Holocaust; I wouldn't say that every work of German cinema and literature should focus on these themes, but wouldn't it be part of anyone's consciousness and environment in postwar Germany? It's not the Maria and others in her family and her milieu are Holocaust deniers or anything of the sort, but it does seem strange that postwar guilt or at least recognition never enters into their conversations and never seems to affect their lives, directly or indirectly. Still, a fine movie in some ways a throwback (it will recall movies like Imitation of Life) but with a contemporary look and style (the interiors of the apartments and housing, and how they evolve over time, are particularly notable - some shot from the Japanese tatatmi-mat perspective) .