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Rainer Werner Fassbinder doesn't haggle, at once he has Germany in the person of a sixtysomething widow out of the rain and into the proletarian tavern for soda and Arabian music. The pub is like every other place, a grid of power plays, a barfly's taunt leads to the slow dance between a Moroccan mechanic (El Hedi ben Salem) and the cleaning woman twice his age (Brigitte Mira). She and her husband were in the Nazi Party back in the day ("Everyone was, just about," she shrugs), work and drink and pidgin aphorisms ("German master, Arab dog... think much, cry much") comprise the immigrant's life in Munich. In her apartment the scene passes from brandy-lubricated commiseration to a furtive caress, a next-morning dissolve gives Mira's look of comic disbelief as she awakens next to the muscled visitor. (Even funnier is her face when a marriage proposal blurted out as an excuse to the landlord is accepted by her new beau with a nod and a toast.) "I'm so happy and so full of fear... "Fear eats the soul." Sirk lays the groundwork with All That Heaven Allows, Aldrich's Autumn Leaves is also brought into play, all goes into a magnificent distillate of taboo and conformism. Wedding dinner alone before peeling olive-green frescoes is just the beginning of the couple's ostracization, the announcement at a family gathering ends with a TV set methodically kicked in by one of her mortified children. Crunching planar arrangements, characters stapled between columns or to frames within frames, De Stijl lines that tighten with each pan of the camera. Prejudices don't so much fade away as adjust with time, the grocer's disdain gives way to flattery and a coworker's twitch of repulsion morphs into a patronizing leer. The hospital coda connects ulcerous stomach and cracked heart, a tableau fir for the artist so filled with acid and tenderness. With Irm Hermann, Barbara Valentin, Elma Karlowa, Anita Bucher, Gusti Kreissl, Margit Symo, Doris Mattes, Katharina Herberg, Peter Gauhe, and Marquard Bohm.
--- Fernando F. Croce |