Effi Briest

Theodor Fontane's 1895 novel, about the consequences of betrayed love, was long a favorite of Fassbinder's. Effi Briest was so important to Fassbinder that he not only wrote the screenplay (which was customary), but in his extensive role as the offscreen narrator he literally became Fontane's voice, and sometimes even Effi's. Adding yet another personal layer, he also cast his own mother, Lilo Pempeit, as Effi's mother.

Although I believe this is one of Fassbinder's most intricate masterpieces, as suggested below, it is also one of his most accessible films. On its most basic level, it features an engrossing melodrama about adultery, albeit one purposefully shorn of histrionics. Set in the closed, repressive Prussian society of the Bismarck era, it shows what happens when teenage Effi Briest (Hanna Schygulla, who appeared in twenty of Fassbinder's films), with prodding from her parents, makes an expedient marriage to a rising politician twice her age, Baron Geert von Instetten, and later has an affair with the charming Major Crampas. The film is marked by performances of exceptional nuance and depth; rich period detail and production design; and striking black and white cinematography. But it also works on many more levels - not only as Effi's wrenching story but as Fassbinder's profound involvement both in the social implications of her tale and in his probing of the expressive possibilities of film itself.

Fassbinder (sometimes accused of being a "stagy" director) here shows his mastery of the expressive possibilities of image. To take one example, just over an hour into the film, there is a scene with Effi and Instetten in their boudoir, which follows the scene where Instetten spied on his wife and her lover (although Effi does not know this). Vsually, Fassbinder plays off of our knowledge of the fraught context by creating a beautiful but telling emblem for Effi's married life. We see her in a nightgown, looking towards the camera, cosseted behind a lace net which fills the frame; her eyes downturned, she sinks into a luxurious feather bed, sippin coffee. Behind Effi sits her stiff husband in a suit, his head bracketed by a grille, trying to trick her into revealing her infidelity. Both of them are watched over by a praying plaster cherub, ironically suggesting the role religion plays in their lives. This one shot - gorgeous yet tense (both compositionally and dramatically) - tells us so much about Effi, her life, and the social/political nature of her world.

On a narrative level, Fassbinder uses the film's formal construction to explore the very repression in Effi's life and world. Like agitprop playwright Bertolt Brecht (some of whose works Fassbinder staged at his theatre), Fassbinder wants to give us distance from the action so that we can better contemplate its social, and perhaps even personal, implications. At one emotionally charged moment, the narrator tells us that Effi "threw herself on Instetten." But we see no such thing. The couple is offscreen, and we are left in the kitchen watching the servants desultorily preparing a meal. This defuses the melodrama, which produces a fascinating double effect. On the one hand, it thwarts our expectations - hence giving us aesthetic distance; but on the other hand, it forces us to imagine the scenes for ourselves - which, paradoxically, draws us even further into Effi's life.

In Effi Briest, Fassbinder brings together image, emotion, and idea in extraordinarily rich and complex ways, even as he tells an engrossing story. To take just one more example, it is no accident that this film is filled with statues, which so uncannily parallel the stiff people who share the screen with them. This is a world in which the human figures increasingly recede into the background, where outdoors they are obscured by branches and bushes, while indoors their rigid forms are framed in narrow doorways and reflected - constrained and meaninglessly multiplied - in a series of ever more elaborate mirrors. Fassbinder has captured the poetry of repression: Exquisitely beautiful but enervating, and, ultimately, fatal.