Rainer Werner Fassbinder's savage The Marriage of Maria Braun (1979) established the director as the leading light of the so-called "German New Cinema". Curiously, the film, a box-office success in both Germany and the United States, is rather atypical for the director -- it is a lush historical epic, more on the order of Gone with the Wind or Mildred Pierce than Fassbinder's characteristic films. That said, it must be conceded that the maniacally productive Fassbinder (he died in 1983 after making more than 40 films and countless TV shows) directed pictures in all genres and styles. Consistent throughout his work is his concept that sex is power and that erotic attraction is a kind of tyranny -- Fassbinder illustrates this throughout his films and Maria Braun is an application of this thesis to German history writ large. The film is spectacularly staged, takes place over the period from 1945 to 1954, the years of the German Wirtschaftwunder, a period when a society literally reduced to ashes and rubble reinvented itself as an economic powerhouse. Maria Braun staggers a little with the weight of allegory and, at times, it threatens to become overly schematic and tendentious, an argument about the discontents of German capitalism, but the film evades these pitfalls on the basis of an astonishing performance by Hanna Schygulla, Fassbinder's muse who appeared in about a dozen of his most notable films. Schygulla's performance is deeply disturbing, the portrait of a avowed feminist who sacrifices her life on the altar of a kind of romantic love that all of her actions in the film eschew and, even, vehemently contradict. Schygulla is a beautiful woman and she makes the heroine's destructiveness palpable -- she is the ultimate femme fatale, strutting around in spectacular lingerie and clad in slinky serpentine gowns, her pale face a fabulous and indifferent mask, ultimately unknowable even to herself; as the film reveals, she has never even really known her own mind -- her ceaseless strivings and manipulation of pliable men are all in the service of an ideal in which she really doesn't believe. I have said that the film is similar in form and content to Mildred Pierce, the story of woman who bullies herself into success that really doesn't solve any of her problems. But the secret source for the film is Gone with the Wind -- a woman who sacrifices everything to survive a great historical cataclysm only to learn that survival is not a viable end in itself. Fassbinder asserted that he wanted to make films as "beautiful" as those produced in Hollywood but not so "hypocritical" and The Marriage of Maria Braun may be his most successful effort of this kind -- his "masterpiece" as Wim Wenders calls the film in his almost clinically depressed-sounding commentary.
The film is more precisely and extravagantly made than most of Fassbinder's somewhat improvised pictures. The shooting schedule was longer and more elaborate and the budget higher. Several scenes have the characteristics of the big-scale Hollywood historical epic -- hoards of extras tumbling about on big, impressive period locations. Many of Fassbinder's less ambitious films are very intricate pictorially -- he uses complicated networks of mirrors and fun-house effects, sometimes, to shore up pictorially narratives that are actually very slight. This movie doesn't have that visual panache although it is very beautifully, if (more or less) conventionally designed. This may have something to do with the fact that the extremely ingenious script, far better than some of the chaotic stuff Fassbinder committed to film, was written on the basis of the director's ideas by two scenarists. The result is that film, which is overlong by about 20 minutes, is very scrupulously plotted and designed with a symmetrical opening and ending, employing a series of carefully developed leit motifs as the picture proceeds. Every aspect of this movie seems carefully considered and so, if Schygulla's break-out performance weren't so utterly fierce and indelible, the whole thing would seem slightly over-contrived and airless.
The film stars off with a literal bang: we see Hitler's face and, then, there's an explosion ripping down a wall so that we can see Maria and her husband at their civil marriage at the town hall. As machine gun bullets spray across the facade, Maria and her husband (and the hapless presiding bureaucrat) lie face down in the rubble, signing off on the marriage contract -- on the soundtrack, a baby howls, explosions rock the landscape, and the adagio of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony plays elegiacally. The film that follows is designed in a neat four act structure. Act one involves Maria's efforts to survive in the ruins of Berlin after the war. She is given some cigarettes when an American GI pointlessly insults her and, then, apologizes. She trades the cigarettes for her mother's bejeweled brooch, trades the brooch to a black marketeer for a low-cut evening gown and a bottle of gin (she's not interested in the guy's 1906 edition of the complete works of Heinrich von Kleist: "books burn too quickly and don't provide enough warmth," she grumbles.) Fassbinder is excellent in a cameo as the awful black market merchant. With the booze and her new dress, Maria goes to work in a night club off-limits to German men as a prostitute. Maria's husband is missing in action and she walks around with a sign on her back inquiring about him. A war buddy stumbles home and says that her husband, Hermann Braun was killed in combat. Maria is distraught and leaves the shattered apartment (people walk into rooms through holes in the wall) to go to the sleazy bar "so (she) can be alone." Act Two details Maria's love affair with a Black officer. The big older man is kind to Maria and teaches her English "in bed" as she says. Maria's husband comes back and stands outside the room watching Maria get ready to have sex with the Black GI. She sees her shattered husband and her face is rapt with joy -- "It is Hermann," she happily exclaims. Hermann knocks her down, enraged at the presence of the naked Black man. But, then, he scrambles across the room to light a cigarette -- fags and food are foremost here. When a fight ensues with the GI, Maria hits the man over the head and kills him. She's charged with the murder but, at her trial, Hermann claims that he is the murderer. And, so, Hermann goes to prison. Maria visits him faithfully, every Saturday, and says that she will make enough money so that she can build a house for them when he is released. In Act Three, Maria insinuates her way into the affections of a factory owner named Karl Oswald, a French-German middle-aged man, who needs the girl's help in negotiating with Americans -- Maria knows fluent English. Maria is attracted to Karl Oswald and begins an affair with him, taking the lead so that she can control the situation. As Karl Oswald's administrative assistant and the de facto manager of the business, Maria becomes a wealthy woman. She confesses her sexual escapades to her husband, telling him that she is not sleeping with Karl Oswald to exploit him but on account of her sexual desire -- she must be the person in power in all sexual relationships. Hermann is released from jail, but goes to Canada to "become a human being again" before he will rejoin her at the villa that she has built in Berlin. Act Four is the film's extended last scene, about 12 minutes long. Karl Oswald has died and willed to Maria half of his factory, the other half granted to Hermann Braun in recognition of his long-suffering love for the woman that Karl Oswald also loved. Hermann appears at Maria's villa. She is drunk, mourning Karl Oswald. Maria responds to Hermann by dressing in some of the most intimidating lingerie ever shown in a film. Faced with the aggressively sexual Maria, poor Hermann demurs and tries to buy some time. (Maria changes her clothing repeatedly in this last sequence and it's all fabulous stuff.) Hermann''s not sure he's up to what she seems be demanding. Oswald's factotum, Senkenberg, and a notary arrive to read the Will. On the radio, the German soccer team is playing Hungary for the World Cup -- this establishes the date as September 1954. Maria has lit a cigarette from a gas-lighter on her stove, but forgotten to turn off the gas when she blows out the flame. She goes into the kitchen for some reason, probably to light a cigarette, and there is a big explosion and Maria is apparently killed. (Perhaps, she commits suicide but this is ambiguous). Fassbinder is nothing if not efficient -- his protagonist dead, he flashes red letters on the screen superimposed over the burning house The Marriage of Maria Braun -- a woman screams somewhere and we hear the sports announcer crowing in triumph over Germany's defeat of the Hungarian team.
The film portrays post-war Germany as a savage dog-eat-dog world. Only the strong survive. Maria Braun dreams of becoming a placid housewife living happily with her loving husband, but this not consistent withh her ceaseless struggle to make money and become successful. The idealized romantic love reserved for Hermann co-exists with her various, somewhat sordid, erotic adventures. She compartmentalizes her life into separate existences -- "I'm not interested in the past," she says. "I live for the future." This is good advice in a country with an immediate past like post-war Germany. (There is some acknowledgement of past crimes: when Maria seduces the Black GI, Mr. Bill she says: "Better black than brown" referring to the brown shirts of the Nazis.) Her happy life is always just about to begin, but she's killed before she can be reunited with Hermann in any kind of satisfactory embrace. Indeed, in the final shots of the couple, she's sprawled on the bed half-naked with her head drooping over the side of the mattress and Fassbinder uses point-of-view shots to show that both of them are literally upside-down to one another -- they can scarcely occupy the same frame because they have become so radically different to one another. A set of images of German chancellors after the war concludes the film, forming a bookend to the picture of Hitler at the outset of the movie -- the more things change, the more they stay the same. At one point, we hear Konrad Adenauer saying that Germany will never have an army; later, in the film, we hear him speaking on the radio and announcing that Germany must rearm itself. The film is remarkably rich with subplots and subsidiary, if intensely realized, minor characters. Maria's mother has a lover in the film's last half, a fat guy that Maria supports -- we first see him wearing a dirty undershirt in the hallway of the tenement where Maria lives. He's fighting for the use of a toilet with a cunning, also dirty, old man, Grandpa Berger. Hermann's war buddy becomes a union negotiator and actually works on settling labor contracts with Maria when she is the manager of the garment factory. Willy, the war buddy, is bored with his wife, Betti, who is Maria's best friend, although their relationship wanes as the film progresses. (Betti has become a conventional Hausfrau.) A saturnine fellow named Senkenberg is the accountant for the factory business -- he opposes Maria's business methods, techniques that rely in equal part on cunning and sex, but has to admit her success in the transactions that she engineers. There is a miserable doctor who periodically injects himself with morphine, who checks Maria for sexually transmitted diseases, and, presumably, aborts her child with Mr. Bill --" the boy's a Black angel now," Maria says cheerfully. Everything in the movie is very effectively acted (except the people playing Americans who seem to be reading their lines phonetically). The films is structured musically on the basis of various themes -- for instance, a viewer can fruitfully trace the meaning of cigarettes through the picture. (Maria doesn't smoke for the first half of the movie and, therefore, has a great advantage -- she can use her stock of cigarettes as currency since she doesn't consume them herself. In the second part of the movie, she does smoke but isn't very good at it -- with the result being the film's explosive denouement). During the so-called Wirtschaftswunder, there is a sound like machine-gun fire constantly rattling in the distance -- it's jack-hammers symbolizing the construction by which the new Germany is being rebuilt.
Fassbinder was estranged from Hanna Schygulla for the four years before this film was made. She distrusted the director who was, in many ways, monstrous. In particular, she felt that he had infantilized her in making his adaptation of Effi Briest, a novel by Theodor Fontane that is equivalent and, in some ways, superior to Flaubert's Madame Bovary. (In fact, the role of the hapless adulteress Effi Briest requires that the part be very passively acted, an approach true to the novel but disliked by Schygulla.) Fassbinder lured the actress back into his films with the part of the hyper-aggressive and, yet, insanely romantic, Maria Braun. And the role made Schygulla, for a short time, a big international star. The movie was produced when Fassbinder was writing the 13 episodes for Berlin Alexanderplatz and he seems to have been remote and preoccupied on the set of Maria Braun -- in fact, cameraman Michael Ballhaus, in his commentary, suggests that as principal photographer on the film, he actually helmed much of the picture. If this is true, it would account for the relatively conservative approach to the plot and mise-en-scene. The movie is a bit tedious, but it has intensely imagined novelistic details, and Hanna Schygulla's performance is "for the ages" -- once seen, it can't be forgotten.
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