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The satirical thrust is The Blue Angel, also Nabokov's "Ode to a Model," pulled by Rainer Werner Fassbinder into something like the greatest women's prison film. Cats on a darkened staircase for the opening titles, the camera pulls back to contemplate the studio-boudoir-dungeon where Petra (Margit Carstensen) is roused like a vampiress. A fashion doyenne, she lords imperiously from her bed, dictates a letter to a certain "Herr Mankiewicz" ("There are circumstances between heaven and earth..."), and seizes her silent servant (Irm Hermann) for a terse pas de deux scored to The Platters. "Easy to pity, hard to understand," the motto of the woman ruthlessly controlling hard-won space. (A nude Bacchus dominates the billboard-sized Poussin mural in the background, the phallocracy of the outside world petrified but always looming.) Her hauteur turns out to be little more than the sum of her perukes and façades, all it takes is rejection from a plebeian Galatea (Hanna Schygulla) for it to unravel. An audience of staring, limbless mannequins savor the spectacle: "That's how oppression comes, quite automatically." Relationships to Fassbinder are waltzes of power shifts and eclipses, life's "codes of behavior" laid bare as the frozen, flattened poses of melodrama. His characters spear each other with words only to beg for forgiveness, weep through blank visages and laugh raucously without the slightest hint of mirth. Throughout, Michael Ballhaus' camera languidly circles and zooms, pinning actors to cluttered décor in one concentrated composition after another. Sprawled on the wasteland of a terrycloth rug, clutching doll and bottle of gin, Petra is Medusa brought to her knees, spitting fire at friends and family. "My daughter loves a girl. How peculiar." A stunning, frigid hothouse in four acts and an epilogue, the equal of the very best of Losey or Duras. The crushed tea set of the bourgeoisie yields to a throb of Verdi, "The Great Pretender" heralds a working-class insurrection, then lights out. With Katrin Schaake, Eva Mattes, and Gisela Fackeldey.
--- Fernando F. Croce |