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Madame Bovary by any other name, "a story of renunciation." The screen is a white page, Rainer Werner Fassbinder's engravings are a transposition of Fontane's prose, a poisoned luminosity. The heroine is "an aerial spirit" introduced on a garden swing, Hanna Schygulla in close-up is a portrait by John Singer Sargent. (Whistler and Atget also figure in the pellucid formal approach.) The Prussian baron (Wolfgang Schenck) is twice her age and "a born schoolmaster," their union is that of aesthete and porcelain doll. His love is the abstract kind, she grows isolated in their Baltic manor, surrounded by mirrors and veils and glass partitions. "Coldness and dullness" are accepted and a half-hearted indiscretion costs dearly, the fling with the military officer (Ulli Lommel) is discovered by accident, "duty to the community" must be upheld. At the altar of purity Effi expires, "fighting and resistance are not her strong points." Ophüls is the model for Fassbinder's reframing of characters, the "artifice calculated to create fear" bespeaks a close study of Rebecca and Gaslight. The hangdog pharmacist (Hark Bohm) is the smitten friend who doesn't dare, the stout nanny (Ursula Strätz) has her own tale of family cruelty. A hundred literary details etched in silvery grays, at the center is a maiden's sense of evanescence, a Blakean emanation. The long rumination on the necessity of a duel showcases Karlheinz Böhm's resemblance to James Mason, it cuts to the pistol in close-up and a long shot of a crumpling figure by the pale beach. Saint-Saëns provides the leitmotif, genteel violins to contrast with the vehemence of the maiden's climactic outburst. "Marriage changes a person." A period parallelism with the terrors of Martha, a work of gravestones and epiphanies. Through Polanski's Tess it passes to arrive at Davies' The House of Mirth. Cinematography by Dietrich Lohmann and Jürgen Jürges. With Lilo Pempeit, Herbert Steinmetz, Irm Hermann, Rudolph Lenz Lenz, Karl Scheydt, Eva Mattes, and Barbara Valentin. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |