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 ...