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Hitler's portrait collapses to reveal the titular protagonist (Hanna Schygulla), not "the bitch that bore him" (Brecht) but a Mädchen trying to get hitched. (The couple roll on the ground trying to get the terrified registrar's stamp during an air raid, just the note of apocalyptic slapstick to kick off Rainer Werner Fassbinder's splendid historical canvas.) The husband (Klaus Löwitsch) goes missing in the Eastern Front, his wife of "half a day and a whole night" has faith in his return and also in the forward push of her own survival. A soldier's taunt earns her cigarettes, exchanged with her mother (Gisela Uhlen) for a brooch which is exchanged for a hostess dress for the makeshift nightclub, the filmmaker is the underground marketeer who wishes the heroine good luck from behind tinted specs. The liaison with the Black American G.I. (George Byrd) is interrupted by the husband's resurrection, war sends men back only to inconvenience women, cf. Sturges' Hail the Conquering Hero. "The truth's what you have in your belly when you're hungry. Feelings are what you have between your legs, like an itch that you scratch." Germany out of the rubble is a businesswoman negotiating body and soul for a new beginning, an abstraction of veil and lipstick and nylon galvanized by Schygulla's purring irony and pondered with Fassbinder's caustic fondness. She sleeps with the melancholy industrialist (Ivan Desny) while forbidding him from falling in love with her, at the union-management gathering she proves herself a shrewd mediatrix, "the Mata Hari of the economic miracle." The layered-combustible mise en scène is a lavish mansion that finally explodes, soccer on the radio and gas on the stove figure in the cyclical bang. "Only if you've known unhappiness, do you still have hope." Cinematography by Michael Ballhaus. With Elisabeth Trissenaar, Gottfried John, Hark Bohm, Claus Holm, Günter Lamprecht, Volker Spengler, Isolde Barth, and Günther Kaufmann.
--- Fernando F. Croce |