[4.4]
This was my first Fassbinder, from back around 2004, and though I’ve seen over a dozen of his works since, I haven’t revisited MARIA BRAUN until now. And wow, does it hold up. Having now experienced a wide range of Fassbinder’s talents, from his gangster flicks to his theatrical gay romps to his Sirkian melodramas to his sci-fi thrillers to his warm slice-of-life working class miniseries, MARIA BRAUN is most assuredly his most streamlined, accessible, and well-constructed masterpiece. BERLIN ALEXANDERPLATZ, THE BITTER TEARS OF PETRA VON KANT and WORLD ON A WIRE all have their fair share (or more) of Fassbinder’s excesses. And while I love his radical experimentation, his theatrical flourishes, and his cooly intellectual approach to characters and emotions, THE MARRIAGE OF MARIA BRAUN distills all of his interests and obsessions into their most pure, simplified, but still utterly satisfying forms. Held together by a masterful performance by Hanna Schygulla, the film follows a straight, uncluttered narrative that focuses almost exclusively on Maria’s rise to economic success following the end of World War II. The film opens explosively, with bomb shelling sounds punctuating the background, and an image of Hitler on a wall crashing down, to reveal Maria and Hermann attempting to get married. As their priest attempts to flee the chaos, the couple has to pin him down and force him to sign their marriage certificate and make it official. This strangely comical sequence is a fantastically sly way to grab the audience’s attention. Then, following an interestingly designed opening credit sequence (red letters of names, repeated and continuing off frame, crowding the screen), the film jumps ahead in time to Maria and her mother trying to get by in the poverty and rubble of occupied Germany. We see the women scrounging to sell off their possessions for basic necessities, while Maria continues to go to the train station wearing a placard of her husband’s face, hoping in vain for some information about where he is. Realizing that she needs to do more to get through these challenging times, she buys a sexy black dress from the black market (and has her disapproving but obliging mother raise up the hem) and talks her way into a job at a bar for American GI’s. She latches on to Bill, a large and gregarious black soldier, but when one of Hermann’s friends returns to town and tells Maria that Hermann is dead, Maria’s emotional commitment to her husband falls away, and she begins a more romantic love affair with Bill. She becomes pregnant and they giddily discuss marriage. But as they are lying in bed, Hermann suddenly returns, and in a rather low-key fight, Maria makes the decision to stick by her husband, and kills Hermann (we only see her smash a vase over his head, and are led to believe this is what did him in? It’s a mostly bloodless, unrealistic vision of murder, and maybe Fassbinder did it this way so our sympathies would stay with Maria?). But Hermann, realizing that Maria did it out of love, takes the blame and goes to prison in her stead.
Maria continues visiting Hermann, committed to staying loyal to him, but she uses her sexuality and wit to charm a wealthy industrialist, Karl Oswald, whom she meets on a train. She makes clear that she wants to keep her identities with him separate: she will work for him and she will be his lover, but on her own terms. But when Hermann is finally supposed to be released from jail, Maria discovers that he has already fled town, vowing to return only once he is financially stable (he refuses to accept Maria’s money as his own, in an old-fashioned view of this as emasculation). Maria grows colder and more aloof. Her temper flares when she grows exasperated with her assistant, and later she shoves some tip money into a mover’s hand, saying “there, now I don’t have to thank you.” Oswald dies and while Maria is initially distraught, she quickly pulls herself back together (in one of the rare moments when Fassbinder inserts one of his flourishes, the trademark “focus on random background characters”, the scene is framed with Maria sitting alone at a table on the right of frame, surrounded by wait staff, while a man gropes a woman’s bare breasts behind a barrier in the foreground of the left side of the frame. The characters don’t interact or even notice each other, but it’s a visually startling and emotionally clashing touch). Finally, Maria learns that her sacrifice has been manipulated, her emotions misplaced. Hermann had made a deal with Oswald, an almost “indecent proposal,” where Hermann agreed to leave town so that Oswald could have Maria to himself, in exchange for Oswald including Hermann in his will (and thus satisfying Hermann’s need to feel financially independent). In one of the most famous Fassbinder endings, Maria goes to the kitchen to light her cigarette, but we had already seen, minutes earlier, that she had forgotten to turn the gas off of the stove. Boom. We hear the sounds of the explosion as the end credits flash on. We see Maria’s body in the rubble. A radio continues to blare out a football match (“Germany is world champion!” the voice screams), and then the film cuts to color negative photos of the post-war chancellors (mirroring the opening sequence of Hitler/explosion).
As Maria ironically declares, she is the “Mata Hari of the economic miracle.” She works for both sides. She’s the shining example and the stern warning. Fassbinder practically begs us to see Maria as an analogy for Germany’s rise out of the ashes of war to become an emotionally stunted, cruelly capitalistic machine. And yet, her character also exists on her own. She’s a complicated creature (as are all of Fassbinder’s women), and Shygulla fully embraces the alluring mix of selfish and selfless desires that make up Maria. Does she really love Hermann or just the idea of loving him? It seems like she holds on to him as a duty, as a sense of honor, as a way of clinging to her identity as Hermann’s wife. It seems like she really loves Bill too, and maybe Oswald initially, but her conflicted impulses lead her to strive for economic success above all else (with her economic freedom tied to her idea of having a home for Bill to come back to). But when Bill returns, she sees that she has no future. He doesn’t love her, she doesn’t really know him, and her big empty house has no meaning. The Sirkian melodramatic flourishes only peak out on occasion (most delightfully in the theatrically eerie musical notes that sound with almost campy dramatic effect, such as when we see Maria’s doctor writhing in pain. Hidden from her, like many characters, behind a screen, the doctor shoots himself up with some morphine, while Maria innocently confides in him that she is only going to sell drinks in the bar, not her body. She is so blind to his condition that she also insists that he be the one to deliver her baby, which the addicted doctor with shaking withdrawal fingers wisely suggests is not the best idea). Fassbinder injects enough political commentary into the narrative without overwhelming it, with enough of it subtle but persuasive enough to get on first viewing (for instance, Maria’s mother coldly rationalizes selling off her dead husband’s things right after the war because they need the money; but years later, once Maria has satisfied all of her mother’s material comforts, her mother grows wistful and sentimental for her husband and the past, her economic status affording her the luxury of nostalgia). While seemingly not as difficult as Fassbinder’s other works, MARIA BRAUN offers a rich text and subtext that reward with each viewing. It doesn’t hurt that Michal Ballhaus’ final film for Fassbinder is filled with gorgeous imagery and camera movements. It may have been a notoriously difficult shoot for cocaine-binging Fassbinder, but the results are surprisingly restrained and as close to Hollywood storytelling as he ever got.
burning retina 