Happy 80th 🎂 Rainer Werner Fassbinder - EFFI BRIEST (1974)

 

(Watched via the Criterion Channel, excellent restored version fyi)

Happy (would be) 80th birthday to Rainer Werner Fassbinder! And here I go watching (for me) one of his more frustrating films

I have to think if I chose Effi Briest to watch as one of the first films (or even the first dare I say) from that masterful enfant terrrible RW Fassbinder I might have taken some time to go to some of his other, much more notable and greater works. Coming to this after seeing the larger part of his body of work helps in the sense of putting the film into some kind of Evolution of a Career context, though it sadly does not make for a more satisfying experience with the film in and of itself.

It is not that I am cold to Fassbinder doing his intentional-distancing Brechtian style on a melodrama, nor that he was incapable of an adaptation; just prior to this the year before he adapted the science fiction dystopia novel Simulacron-3, which was challenging and daring and also quite long as a mini-series but it was captivating and awesome how he made the material his own, and then six years later of course there would be Berlin Alexanderplatz, which is a major work and has some of his most outstanding and provocative material of his career (though six years for a Fassbender-Cat is like twenty for us).

Perhaps a difference with those present-day contemporary melodramas that he did so successfully at around the same time (this is the same year as Ali Feat Eats the Soul and Martha, and just look at what he'd done in 72, 73 and after in 75) is that he was dealing with people and places that to an extent or even more so that he knew and that he felt so compelled to dissect through detachment and irony and distancing. 

With something like Effi Briest, which is not only at a dramatic remove but goes in a kind of "and then this happened and then this happened" storytelling mode including Fassbinder himself reading large chunks of narration often as the title character (Schygulla) is walking around detailing what happened off screen, it means to have the same effect as what he did at the time but just does not land and connect.

I haven't read the book, but seeing some reactions on sites like this and Imdb it would appear that Fassbinder broke apart the book to put it back together again as a film, and means to make it more of an intellectual exercise. This has frustrated some who read the book and loved it, but taking this as its own work it has a more basic cinematic problem of just loads of telling without showing. The contradiction and why Effi Briest is kind of frustrating, like a bad case of the proverbial blue balls, is that it is nothing short of exquisite and gorgeous to look at, as the cinematography is even in its static moments interesting for what compositions we are getting (lots of mirror shots), while the editing is just interminable.

One of the other points when it comes to looking at Fassbinder's tales of emptiness in relationships and the disintegration of self as part of an immovable cog in a system - that seems like a running theme in a number of his films, ie Merchant of Four Seasons or Why Herr R Runs Amok - is that those modern day films were often comparatively brief, often between 85 to 100 minutes.

At 140 minutes, the film lumbers along from scene to scene punctuated by those fades to white with those intertitles and as much as Fassbinder may be mucking around with how to make us intellectually stimulated by what we are seeing (get this, are you sitting down, being in an upper class household and a loveless marriage is suffocating!) He still has to tell the story, and it is here that Effi Briest was cold and empty.

I can only hope that Fassbinder for as low as the budget was for this (at least compared to other costume-type dramas) had a doctor on standby to tend to Schygulla for carrying the film largely on her back. She later said in interviews that she originally didn't think she was good in the film and blamed the director, only later coming around to see what his intentions here. I can see why she would be frustrated given what she's asked to do in scene after scene, but why she is effective and the best thing about the film is in her eyes and what she shows and has to hide away from her husband and from the audience as well.

Effi is in this loveless home and has to keep putting on a good face, and when someone like Major *Crampas (Lommel) comes along it isn't a wonder she has an affair with him (albeit off screen), and Schygulla even in the restraint put on her by her director has a depth of feeling that comes through. The same can't be said about Schenck as her husband, which I am sure is part of the intention of the story is also a repetitive and lifeless performance where he comes in with the same facial expression over and over.

I am still scratching my head about why Effi Briest didn't work for me when I have liked and loved so many RWF films. It could be one of the reasons I listed above, like a failure in adaptation (is this his Bonfire of the Vanities or Dune ala De Palma or Lynch as far as a written work being so much its own thing that bringing it to another medium is a gargantuan feat that either needs a longer run time or just not doing it altogether) or in tone (one really has to go online later on to just figure out certain things that *happen* here despite how much characters talk). It also features a performance by Schygulla that is no less impressive than what she did in her other collaborations, and this has that Every Frame a Painting feel to many shots.

What it comes down to is in one more comparison, which someone else made of this to Barry Lyndon, which is also a gigantic epic about a character finding their way into upper elite society and how it destroys them.  Where Kubrick's story has ample room for satire and really scalding hot emotions under the surface that boil up from time to time, and is about a proactive con man who gets what he wants and then becomes miserable in his position, Effi Briest comes off like it means a whole lot to the filmmaker and he gets what he wants shot to shot but it only occasionally gets to something really fascinating (the story on the beach Lommel tells about the King and the Knight is a highlight, as is the very last shot with the parents and that long awful pause at the end).

It all makes for a film that is more interesting to talk/write about than it is to watch.

Ok, how about a better one?  

So, in essence (and as Patrick Bateman would say and would be misheard as spoken): Murder or Merger?

Despair has a story that may have some digressions and may be long by five minutes, but Dirk Borgarde has such a ferocious dark comic timing and energy here that it keeps the film together and thriving; I have to imagine Fassbinder must have been a fan of or at least seen The Servant and this seems to me, despite a different time period and country, like a descendent of the madness of that Joseph Losey psychological mindfuckery.

My first impression upon finishing it is to say it doesnt quite reach that level of fraught devilish melodrama, but that Fassbinder and Stoppard can get close charting their own demented protagonist (in this case finding a man who he thinks is his "double") is commendable. This is, after all, a story that is set in 1930 in Germany, with Nazism spoken of and seen in plain view (at one point Herman Herman sits and watches Nazis trash a business storefront and doesnt do a thing), and this man is a well off businessman with a chocolate factory and it is almost like this man Felix is a part of his psyche uncorked from himself.

Not every scene is as funny or dramatically meaningful as it could be, but there is enough (roughly 75%) where RWF not only understands but heightens the comedic and absurdly theatrical potential, like when Borgarde explains what is going on to his very naked and perplexed wife Lydia (why doesnt she put on clothes? Eh, look at those bosoms!), who (Andrea Ferreol is the performer) the longer the movie goes on gets more hysterical and it is all the funnier for it.

And in the last act there is this unsettling quality out of a film noir as it looks as though Herman may get what he has wanted... and it just destabilizes him all the more. I can see myself revisiting this some day and getting more out of it; also props to Michael Ballhaus on camera (so much subtle and rich work) and Peer Raben's score that seems to be creating and insane tenor through early synthethizers.