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The hausfrau's existential terror before a three-panel mirror: "So this is me. Me. Me? What is that? What is that, me?" Rainer Werner Fassbinder's title is not incidentally evocative of Rilke (Fear of the Inexplicable), thus the heroine (Margit Carstensen) and a spiral of "relationships repeating themselves from case to case, indescribably monotonous and unrenewed." Having just had her second child, she finds herself sinking into a debilitating, ruthlessly muted panic, visualized with quivering filters perfect in their banality. Her husband (Ulrich Faulhaber) is loving but passionless, her daughter (Constanze Haas) can't understand the growing hysteria, the word "normal" is judgmentally tossed about by her mother-in-law (Brigitte Mira) and sister-in-law (Irm Hermann). Feeling the void, she desperately tries to fill it: Frantic swimming sessions, Valium, earfuls of Leonard Cohen, gulps of cognac, a fling with the pharmacist (Adrian Hoven). When medication is spilled on a bathtub, the image of blue pills scattered across white marble becomes a snapshot of a tangled inner cosmos—the housewife ponders it briefly before applying razor to wrist. The Snake Pit, Repulsion, A Woman Under the Influence... The dolly-zoom unsettles the domestic tableau in an effect mimicked by Scorsese in Goodfellas, though the film is at once clinical and humane: "I wanted to take my mind off the fear," Carstensen muses on the way back from the clinic as hubby stares ahead, teary-eyed. The institutional tour, "schizophrenia" in one, "depression" in the other. Only two people really see her, Fassbinder through a tightly-framed second-story window, and Kurt Raab as the "sick in the head" neighbor facing his own abyss. The man goes the way of Why Does Herr R. Run Amok?, the housewife, now comfortably numb, labors not to care. With Armin Meier, Ingrid Craven, Hark Bohm, and Lilo Pempeit.
--- Fernando F. Croce |