Here is the premise: everyone is suffering some kind of unspecified pain. This pain is inextricably entangled with human existence in West Germany in 1955. People combat this pain with morphine, sex, and morbid nostalgia. But, in the end, the pain prevails. Fassbinder's Die Sehnsucht der Veronika Voss (literally: "The Yearning of Veronika Voss", although Sehnsucht also conveys the notion of drug addiction) rests on the idea that life is unbearable without some distracting analgesia -- in this case, sex and opiates. Fassbinder's prodigious cinematic output leaks into his life. The doomed heroine of his film, the aging movie star Veronika Voss, dies of an overdose of sleeping pills. A year later, Fassbinder himself was dead, the victim of a drug overdose; he was 37 years old. Veronika Voss, one of Fassbinder's finest films, is his penultimate work, followed by the gay fantasy of Querelle, a movie based on a novel by Jean Genet that is generally accounted to be a failure, and, indeed, so self-indulgent that it is difficult to watch.
Veronika Voss is part of a sequence of films styled the "the BRD trilogy" -- BRD stands Bundes Republik Deutschland (West Germany). Although the film was made after Lola, it fits into the chronological sequence of the movies in the middle -- that is sandwiched between the epic Marriage of Maria Braun and Lola. A title announces that it is 1955, that is the year after Maria Braun's villa was blown to pieces in the preceding movie. In Maria Braun, a doctor supplies health certificates to prostitutes and makes angels of their unwanted children -- we see him, presumably, preparing some kind of shot for Maria Braun, but instead injecting himself; he's a morphine addict. Metamorphosed into a domineering and icy female Nervenartzt (Neurologist or "nerve doctor"), this physician is the controlling presence in Veronika Voss and, indeed, a loathsome, conventional villain. Veronika Voss is a parody of a Hollywood melodrama made in the Fifties and it has a murderous arch-villain, a caricature of evil, presiding over the sordid events that the film shows. Fassbinder's greatest strength was his versatility -- almost all of his movies look different from one another and are directed in wildly different styles: some of his films are naturalistic, others have an aspect of allegory, many are flamboyantly stylized. Veronika Voss is shot in high-contrast black-and-white in a narrow Academy-ratio format -- the picture is nakedly expressionistic, with intense shadow, dream-like settings and decor, and catatonic, zombie-like acting all undergirded by a bizarre soundtrack featuring, of all things, Johnny Horton's country-western ballad "The Battle of New Orleans". In some scenes, light flares so aggressively as to imprison the actors in a sort of gilded, radiant cage. In a journalist office, right out of The Front Page, ink-stained wretches type out copy under a huge, stuffed alligator suspended from the ceiling. The evil neurologist's office is stark white, a stainless inferno. Veronika Voss' villa is a ghostly series of interlocking chambers filled with antiques and furniture draped in sheets. Although the picture is intensely stylized, it is never tedious and the decor doesn't overwhelm the actors so much as it reflects their inner states -- in fact, in some ways, Veronika Voss is a more accomplished film than the elaborate and, sometimes, dull Marriage of Maria Braun. That said, The Marriage of Maria Braun, primarily because of Hanna Schygulla's performance, is the greater and more profound movie. Veronika Voss is, in effect, a genre work, a tawdry if effective psycho-drama, that looks like some of Samuel Fuller's more extreme films.
Veronika Voss is an aging movie star, reputed to have slept with Joseph Goebbels. We meet her at a retrospective screening of one of her old movies; Fassbinder is sitting behind her watching the screen with unblinking, owlish intensity. After the movie, Veronika Voss walks through a birch woods, a materialization of the landscape of German fairy tales. It's raining hard and she stops to sob. A burly sportswriter encounters her in the woods -- he doesn't know who she is: "I don't go to the movies much," the sportswriter says. He shelters her under his umbrella and the next day meets her for cocktails at a fantastically upscale bar and restaurant. Voss has no money and she orders the sportswriter to buy her a brooch. Smitten by her exotic, if fading, beauty, the sportswriter, Robert Krohn, gives her 300 marks. She buys the brooch, shows it to him, and, then, departs, apparently for another pressing appointment. (We see her return the brooch to get the 300 marks back in her pocket.) Voss' appointment is with the sinister neurologist who shoots her up with morphine and, then, lets her sleep it off in the ice-white chambers of the clinic. The neurologist is vampire, pure and simple, one of the daughters of Dracula -- she has a witch's familiar, a middle-aged woman who could be her twin (and may be her lover) and an American GI who hangs around the clinic (he's in just about every shot staged there) and seems to be peddling dope on an unseen, and unnamed, American military base. Presumably as a concession to the Black GI, the radio is playing constantly, an unending rotation of American country-and-western hits. The neurologist's modus operandi is to get her patients addicted to morphine and, then, force them to sign away their houses and other assets in exchange for their "medications" -- that is, fixes of morphine. The only other clients that we see are an elderly couple, concentration camp survivors, who own a shadowy antique store -- they are as fragile as the vases that they sell and end up committing suicide together. One of themes in the film is memory and the agony of recalling the past. This theme is reflected in song "Memories are made of this" -- we hear the song played in a Dean Martin version on the radio and, later, sung by Veronika Voss at her "farewell party", a bizarre gathering that seems partly real and partly hallucinated: everyone in the movie has been invited to this party, including minor characters that Veronika Voss can't possibly know, and the soiree takes place in a sort of dark grotto pierced here and there by beams of light that shine onto sinister groupings of actors, all of them conspiring to destroy the Third Reich movie star.
Robert Krohn, the sportswriter, has a plucky girlfriend who loves him, but, nonetheless, masochistically supports his fatal relationship with Veronika Voss. She realizes that she can't compete with the damaged allure of the faded movie star and, so, she cedes her rights in her man to Voss -- this is a disturbing aspect of the plot. Veronika Voss at this stage in her life is one of those women who desperately demands that she be rescued and the hefty, matter-of-fact sportswriter (who also writes surrealist poetry) falls into her trap. His quest to save Veronika from the evil cabal manipulating her turns out to self-destructive and destructive of others also -- the vampires are not about to be exposed and they murder Krohn's girlfriend when she secures evidence against them. As it turns out, everyone is involved in the conspiracy -- the film contains a dizzying amount of paranoia: the drug enforcement officer that Krohn contacts to report on the neurologist's criminal conduct is part of the cabal -- in a classic Hollywood trope, this oily fellow calls the neurologist immediately after Krohn leaves his office, warning her that he is coming to get her. By this time, Veronika is imprisoned in the glacial chambers of the neurologist's office where "The Battle of New Orleans" seems to play on loop. The Black GI sings "I owe my soul to the company store", an obvious reference to the exploitation profiting the neurologist. When Krohn bursts into the clinic to rescue Veronika, the cops are called and, then, Voss appears, like an apparition to say that she is "just fine" and that she doesn't really know Krohn -- that he's a kind of a stalker. The cops believe her, smitten by her star-power, and Krohn is gently led away. He goes to a bar and gets drunk with Voss' former screenwriter, another shadowy figure played by Armin Mueller-Stahl -- the character was once Voss' husband. Sunset Boulevard established indelibly many of the concepts in which Veronika Voss traffics -- for instance, the damaged ex-husband lurking around the star, a thankless role similar to the part played by Erich von Stroheim as Gloria Swanson's butler and ex-husband in the Hollywood picture. Sunset Boulevard was released in 1950 and you want to shout at Krohn: "Didn't you see that picture! Run! Run like hell!~" when Voss begins to entangle him in her web of dependency, ruined vanity, and nightmarish addiction.
There are many wonderful things in the movie. The scintillant lighting is exotic and beautiful -- the brilliant haze of camera flare signifies flashbacks into a more glamorous past. One scene in which a director is forced to make take after take because Veronika can't remember her lines or can't cry on cue is particularly impressive -- the camera on a dolly glides forward slowly like the force of an oppressive destiny. (Veronika ends up having a seizure.) The film captures the panic of drug addiction and it is eerily effective. I recall seeing this movie in a theater in 1983, a big cold room in Uptown, and the impression of grisly doom that the film conveys has remained with me all my life. I recall the theater as being chilly but, perhaps, the icy cold was coming off the screen.
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