Lola

 What does it mean to be "good"?  Is being "good" something other than being "virtuous"?  These questions are posed by Rainer Werner Fassbinder's late (1981) film Lola.  Fassbinder's picture is devised as an allegorical fable, but the film's execution raises it to another level entirely.  Fassbinder was a great iconoclast and he smashes through allegory to arrive at something that feels like the truth.  There is nothing complacent about his late cinema -- he is thoughtful, restless, intuitive, and, above all, not content with the glittering surfaces that he presents.  Part of the so-called BRD trilogy (BRD = Bundesrepublik Deutschland -- that is the former West Germany), Lola is set around 1958 -- that is, after the events depicted in the first film of the group, The Marriage of Maria Braun and also after the action in the final installment in the series, The Yearning of Veronika Voss; the films were made out of order, however, and Lola was produced between Maria Braun and Veronika Voss, Fassbinder's penultimate film and the last that he fully completed..  The films are all startlingly different and represent a master-class in how a great director sculpts his style to the subject matter portrayed.  Lola is shot in extremely expressionist color -- the screen is awash in blue tints and hot pink; a bordello-cabaret is red as a wound and the picture is full of swaths of unnatural color that do violence to your eyes.  The movie looks like Douglas Sirk at his most garish (for instance, Written on the Wind) dipped in some kind of lysergic acid.  Characters are color-coded, indeed, colors serve as Wagnerian leit motifs for the characters.  The film is also full of delirious musical numbers and, in some ways, plays like an American movie musical gone berserk.  Everything is unreal about the movie, but, ultimately, the audience senses that they are perceiving something like the inner truth about the characters and their milieu.  In Fassbinder's repertoire, the film's form and plot most resemble Ali, Fear devours the Soul, the story of a woman in late middle-age, dowdy and without any glamor, who falls in love with a Black Moroccan immigrant -- that film, much more realistically mounted, seems to be following the formula of a Sirk melodrama of mismatched lovers until it morphs into something much more profound, unstable, and unpredictable.  Lola has the same structure -- at first, we think we're watching an update of von Sternberg's The Blue Angel, a film about the destruction of a German bourgeois professor at the hands of a slutty cabaret singer. (This was the impression Fassbinder cultivated in the German news media and, in  fact, paid royalties to the estate of Heinrich Mann, the author of the novel adapted as The Blue Angel.)  But, in fact, the movie takes a much weirder and more profound turn.  

In a small city in West Germany, a vulgar, industrious building contractor controls the economy.  This man, named Schuckert, is working on revitalizing the war-traumatized city by erecting a huge housing project called Lindenhof.  Everyone in town is beholding to the cheerfully corrupt Schuckert who runs everything, including a spectacular brothel - cabaret frequented by all of the town's worthies.  Schuckert's prize possession is his whore, Lola, a blonde beauty who sings in the brothel.  Lola boasts that she has "the sweetest ass in NATO" and Schucket, who is married to shrewish and bigoted wife, agrees with her. (Barbara Sukowa plays the heroine and she's fantastic.)  Everything in town is progressing well; the city is slowly being rejuvenated and, even, the small group of anti-war and anti-armament protesters seem to be contented.

The oldest plot in the world, some say, is the story of a stranger coming to town.  In this case, the stranger is the new building commissioner, von Bohm, a Prussian from the lost East of Germany who is depicted as incorruptible and a man of singular goodness.  (Armin Mueller-Stahl plays von Bohm in a great, indelible performance -- it is hard to play a man of simple goodness but Mueller-Stahl succeeds in this task, helped by the film's stunning camerawork:  von Bohm is always shot bathed in cool blue light and a kind of Aryan mist of dewy blue seems extromitted from his eyes.)  Von Bohm is a realist, good  but not overly virtuous -- he sees that the town is flourishing under the corrupt regime of Schuckert and, although he's a hard-working Prussian bureaucrat, he's willing to look the other way and tolerates the contractor's crooked dealings.  Working with people like Schuckert is part of being good -- it serves the common well-being in the town.  Lola hears about von Bohm's elegant courtly manners and his kindness and, when Schuckert contemptuously tells her that such a fine gentleman would never be interested in a whore like her, she makes a bet with her boss.  If Schuckert will buy her thirty bottles of the best champagne upon her triumph, she will seduce von Bohm.  

Of course, von Bohm isn't interested in the boozing and whoring that takes place at Schuckert's cabaret.  So Lola contrives to meet the bureaucrat, charms him, and even writes poems that she reads to him over the telephone.  Von Bohm goes for chaste strolls with her and, even, sings a religious round (or canon) with her while kneeling in the local Church.  Of course, he falls in love with her and even attempts to impress Lola by buying a garish, checked suit -- she doesn't like it and remarks that it is inconsistent with von Bohm's personality.  For reasons that are unclear, perhaps her own scruples, Lola breaks off the relationship with von Bohm -- probably, she admires him herself and wants to protect him. Von Bohm gets drunk and is lured into Schuckert's cabaret where he sees Lola perform.  (This is a bravura sequence -- Lola is always shot in a flare of shocking hot pink; however, when she sees von Bohm staggering toward the stage, her face flares with the blue light in which he is always bathed.)  Bohm flees the cabaret and spends the night drinking at his office.  In the morning, his slavishly admiring secretary and assistant, finds him lying on the floor disheveled and unshaven.  This is shocking to her and us because von Bohm has always been the embodiment of the faithful and incorruptible German bureaucrat -- it's important to understand that Bohm tolerates Schuckert's chicanery but will not allow himself to be bribed or to earn anything from the contractor's crooked practices.  Von Bohm, then, engages in a reign of terror and virtue -- here is where the distinction between common goodness and virtue becomes manifest.  He decides to destroy Schuckert and so sabotage the Lindenhof project on which the town depends.  He gathers evidence of Schuckert's corruption and tries to present it to the Press.  The journalist is unimpressed -- he's looking for a juicy sex scandal and not  just a bunch of corruptly bid public contracts.  Von Bohm denies building permits for the Lindenhof project and stalls construction work.  He even begins consorting with local anarchists and anti-war (anti-armaments) protesters.  (One of them is Esslin, a minor factotum in the government offices, who is an anarchists follower of Bakunin and the drummer in Lola's stage band and her admirer.)  No one wants von Bohm's brand of terrorist virtue and even Esslin tries to dissuade him from stalling the Lindenhof construction -- Schuckert ultimately coopts Esslin by hiring him to work for his contracting firm.  Von Bohm gets drunk again and invades the cabaret -- there Schuckert decides to mollify von Bohm by giving him Lola.  He says he will "sell" Lola to von Bohm.  Von Bohm takes her upstairs and degrades her, but, then, collapses in tears in her lap.  In the film's short coda, we see von Bohm's marriage to Lola -- he makes a decent woman out of her.  But not too decent:  when he goes for a stroll with Esslin and Lola's illegitimate daughter, Marie (who may be Schuckert's child), Schuckert and Lola meet and have sex -- she still has the "sweetest ass in NATO" Schuckert proclaims.

The film is a parable about goodness, which means something like simple kindness, and virtue which is another thing entirely.  The picture, also, of course chronicles the many compromises that Germans made in order to achieve the so-called Wirtschaftswunder -- that is, the economic miracle of the nation's rebirth from the rubble of Year Zero after the World War.  The film harkens back to The Marriage of Maria Braun in that a key scene takes place at a family gathering in which we hear a soccer game playing on the radio.  (An important landmark in the film is von Bohm's purchase of a TV set to watch the single station available in Germany-- everyone peers intently and with wonder at the test pattern.)  In The Marriage a gas leak explodes destroying the bourgeois home and the heroine; in Lola, nothing bad happens -- everyone gets along fine and there is no annihilating blast.  Any schematic depiction of the film ignores numerous memorable minor characters -- there is a whore who dreams about getting married but only after a menses (that is, a period of a month of purification after working as a prostitute); her fiancee gets in a motorcycle crash, suffering brain damage, and she abandons the project.  There is a Black GI, the man who played Maria Braun's lover in The Marriage, who von Bohm instinctively despises but seems to come to like.  Complicating the situation is the fact that von Bohm is lodging with Lola's mother, a handsome fifty year old woman who seems sad and has abandoned hope.  Lola's daughter, who is about four, has some important scenes in the film -- at the end of the movie, we see her climb into a hayloft in barn where Lola and von Bohm once strolled during their brief courtship.  The little girl reclines in the loft just as her did her mother during her walk with von Bohm.   This time von Bohm and Esslin are discussing their happiness.  Innumerable small touches of this sort enliven the picture and give it depth.  

Fassbinder was an impossible man, vicious and unmanageable -- but he is also one of cinema's greatest moralists on par with Jean Renoir.  Repeatedly, in the film people say that they must play by "the rules in the game" invoking one of Renoir's greatest pictures.  The quality of the films in the BRD trilogy is very, very high.  And Lola, which is a lesser known picture (I hadn't seen it) is on par with the two other pictures in the trilogy, both of them, I think, masterpieces.