Fassbinder Double Feature: "Ali" & "Maria Braun"
Saturday, March 14, 2020 at 2:30PM 
In these days of "social distancing" and delayed releases, the cinephiles among us must satiate our hunger for cinema in the privacy of their own homes. Streaming services are saviors during such trying times, offering a respite from the chaos. Among them, The Criterion Channel continues to shine brightest as a paragon for the promotion of the seventh art's best triumphs. Just this month, two of Rainer Werner Fassbinder's most beloved and accessible masterpieces were made available for streaming. We're talking about 1974's Ali: Fear Eats the Soul and 1979's The Marriage of Maria Braun.
Join us as we peruse the glamor and doom, fear and fury of these singular films…
First up, we have Fassbinder's version of All That Heaven Allows transplanted to the economic and social purgatory of 1970s West Germany, Ali: Fear Eats the Soul. The oversexed bastard child of New German Cinema was a great admirer of Douglas Sirk's melodramas, distilling their essence into works such as this. He pilfers from the grave of the old master but leaves the irony of his Hollywood movies behind. Case in point, for the Sirkiest of his films, Fassbinder chose to be deadly sincere. Thusly, the subtext of Sirk's forbidden romance turns into super text in Ali.
This is the story of Emmi, a German cleaning woman in her 60s, and Ali, a young Moroccan mechanic. They meet by chance when, during a rainy evening, she takes shelter in the bar where he goes to have drinks after work. The two find unlikely companionship in one another and fall in love, a dance gives way to a night spent together and to marriage. In a cosmos that seems drained of joy, where cold materialism rules the lives of all, this romance is like a flower of happiness, a dandelion breaking through concrete. But "happiness isn't always fun", not when the world seems so keen to kill it.
Nosy neighbors look on, judgment in their eyes and venomous words working like daggers that rip the heart apart. Even those who should remain steadfast by one's side, friends and family, soon fall into paroxysms of racism, xenophobia, ageism and class anxiety. The tides turn when those traitors start seeing Emmi as a needed consumer and source of valuable service. As for Ali, he's a fresh commodity ready for exploitation, his muscles lustily evaluated by the neighbors like a farmer would assess a horse's strength. Economic interest trumps racial prejudice, intolerance defeated by self-interest. It's not acceptance, it's the shallow clemency of a parasite ready to suck the blood of a new host.
Soon, the moral rot of this society starts infecting the very fabric of the relationship as Emmi buckles under the weight of ostracization. Her privileges as a white German influence the way she treats her husband, becoming more of a boss than a lover. Ali, incapable of holding socioeconomic power over Emmi, turns to his sexual virility and youth, hurting her by reigniting a past affair. Neither of their actions are born out of malice, they're just afraid. Fear of rejection, of loneliness and powerlessness, eats them from the inside out. It's irrational, dangerous and, like wildfire, it can burn everyone to a crisp if left unchecked. Their romance may be fear overcome but fear isn't defeated for a connection made in an alienated world is as precious as it is fragile.
Fassbinder shot Ali in 14 days, but the speediness of his work in no way means there's a lack of formal discipline. The director materialized these social dynamics by filming the drama with overbearing stillness. The compositions turn domestic spaces into claustrophobic traps that nonetheless feel cavernous and empty. This rigid approach is brutal, but there's also tenderness coming from the performances and the way the actors are shot. A tender gesture and the attack of a brute always exist in synchronicity within Fassbinder's oeuvre and never more so than in Ali: Fear Eats the Soul.
His work is so often cruel, brimming with disdain towards his casts of merry masochists, that Ali can feel like a breath of fresh air. Yes, it's a story marked by hate, internalized fear, and social isolation, but there's a great deal of affection running through its veins. Thinking back to Sirk, this is a peculiar breed of melodrama, one that refuses sentimentality but lets itself indulge in romantic naivete. It's certainly among the simplest and kindest of Fassbinder's masterworks, lacking the historical sweep of the BDR trilogy or the venomous ferocity of Chinese Roulette and the film within a film mayhem of Beware of a Holy Whore.
Speaking of Fassbinder's BDR trilogy and the weird cinematic children of Douglas Sirk, The Marriage of Maria Braun is an outright anti-melodrama when compared to Ali. The most famous trappings of the genre are here, but they've been drained of lustful ardor, cinematic ambrosia turned to vinegar. The entire world of the film is so beaten by the hardship of war and reconstruction, traumatized and famished, that the emotional investment for a melodrama simply isn't there. It's as if everyone's too exhausted to entertain any excess of sentimentality. No indulgence is admitted in this film about hunger masked with decaying lipstick.
The film centers around the titular Maria Braun and starts with her wedding. It also starts with a bang, literally. As the sound of an air bombing roars in the soundtrack, a wall plastered with pictures of Hitler is blown to smithereens revealing the wedding ceremony going on inside the building. The soundscape, which comes to include the panicked cries of a baby, assaults the ear with animalistic vigor while the images profane the idea of marriage with demonic glee. There's smoking devastation, brides rolling around on the floor and blood-red font covering the screen with nearly unreadable credits. This is wartime chaos and it's from this hell that a new Germany will be born.
As much as it is about a trio of fascinating women, the BDR trilogy, which also includes 1981's Lola and 1982's Veronika Voss, is Fassbinder's portrait of the Wirtschaftswunder, Germany's postwar economic miracle. The historical causes of the phenomenon are beyond the director's interests, however. What seemed to fascinate Fassbinder was the self-imposed amnesia of a nation that dared to name their reconstruction a miracle. What happened wasn't any sort of miraculous wonder, but an unstable democracy built on the ruins of rampant inhumanity with a foundation of amoral capitalism.
The Marriage of Maria Braun denudes the jolly lie of the German economic miracle of its benign costume and parades reality through the screen, naked and feral. The true colors of the era are personified by Maria Braun herself. She's the self-described Mata Hari of the economic miracle, a slave to capital, the devil or perhaps a black-hearted angel covered in perfumed silks and dead flowers. Looking like a Teutonic Barbara Stanwyck, Hanna Schygulla plays Maria as a woman motivated by the survivalist fight-or-flight instinct of a trapped animal. She uses her sexuality as a master manipulator, but there's an aloof quality to her eroticism, a pragmatic arrogance that's abrasive and angry.
In many ways, she's a fitting heroin for these cynical times, her monstrous opportunism and utter disaffection a symptom of the period more than a character flaw. In postwar Germany, feelings are for sale and one's soul is cheap business. Other directors might portray Maria as a martyr or a harpy, but Fassbinder turns his back on moralistic binaries. His camera loves to watch Schygulla's temptress as she trades humanity for financial stability. Her will to survive and thrive is admirable, even if those treasures come without the prize of happiness. By the end of the film, the joy of living has become an indecent abstraction for this woman that sees everything as the transaction of consumable commodities.
Maria won her fight for prosperity and so did West Germany, but through Fassbinder's camera, theirs is a hollow victory. Everyone we see in the film, not just the protagonist, seems slightly disconnected from their own emotions, tired and sullen both when they're in the office and when they're in the bedroom. Ali's tenderness is here substituted by cold detachment, a dejected exhaustion tainting the drama to an uncomfortable degree. Still, The Marriage of Maria Braun is endlessly watchable and was Fassbinder's greatest commercial success. By packaging his searing historical critique within a shell of sudsy melodrama, this cinematic master managed to subvert the genre and made bitter poison taste like the sweetest of desserts.
Don't miss these masterpieces of the New German Cinema. They truly are some of the best films ever made.
Reader Comments (8)
Great performances in really incredible films by the great genius, Rainer Werner Fassbinder.
Brigitte Mira is the rightful winner of 1974's Best Actress.
It's such an insightful article, so beautifully written by Cláudio. You went very deep in the analysis of the films and what makes them works of art. I like that you consider Chinese Roulette one of the great Fassbinder films - it seems to be, sadly, overlooked at times, although it's getting more recognition as the years go by.
Ali: Fear Eats the Soul is a must as well as a great example of how to do melodrama right.
I find Fassbinder the least accessible by far of all the great filmmakers. It took me three separate viewings across three periods of my life (with five years in between) of all of his major films, including the two masterworks you examine here, before I could finally *finally* get him. He always used to bore and alienate me. Now he's among my absolute favorite artists.
I actually find Marriage of Maria to be his deepest and most devastating film (not just his most 'popular' as it's usually dismissed). I just find it so moving the way history and society divorce Maria from her own capacity to feel anything and the shift happens so gradually and in such tiny increments that she doesn't even notice it herself until it's far too late. It's just such a profound film, and such a great showcase for Schygulla as well - herself one of Germany's major twentieth century artists.
Ali too, is a perfect film. Though I wonder if I'm as culpable as the film 's characters because my god do I struggle to focus on the story and the messaging, distracted as I get every time by Mr Ben Salem's goddamn sexiness.
Surely Fassbinder isn't inaccessible? His frequent indulgence in familiar tropes of Hollywood melodrama makes him at least more audience-friendly, than, say, Tarr or Apichatpong or Akerman. Not sure how you're defining the "great filmmakers" though.
Anyway, these are probably my two favorite Fassbinder films, which I realize is boring considering they're probably his most popular. But for good reason!
I'd class all 3 of those as great but I think when I wrote the above post I was mainly thinking of pre-80s canonical filmmakers. (Akerman still qualifies but for some reason I never struggled to embrace her on her own terms. Though admittedly I discovered her work much later than Fassbinder's)
Anyway it's all very subjective but to me for many years Fassbinder's work came off as dry and willfully alienating.
I think with someone like Weerasethakul or Akerman, from frame one the sensibility announces itself as so very bluntly singular and non traditional that you know straight away to try parse deeper and find how to emotionally engage with it in a new non-conventional way
With Fassbinder on the other hand, because his stories at first read as relatively conventional narratives, it's easy to at first miss the denser more rewarding layers. The theatricality, academic visual style and ironically self destructive impulses of pretty much all his characters (which are actually extremely difficult to parse unless you're totally locked into his sensibility) don't exactly make him easy and endearing to novice film buffs.
For ages I found it near impossible to even get hold of his work on DVD (and on, gulp, video) and I don't think that's just coincidence
This site is what turned me into a Fassbinder Fanatic and I really appreciate this write up. I've been holding off on the BDR Trilogy, but this article makes me realize I need to dive in!