Dans l'Allemagne de l'Ouest d'après-guerre, le charmant Von Bohm est nommé directeur des travaux publics d'une ville. Sa moralité est mise à l'épreuve lorsqu'il tombe amoureux de Lola, sans ... Tout lireDans l'Allemagne de l'Ouest d'après-guerre, le charmant Von Bohm est nommé directeur des travaux publics d'une ville. Sa moralité est mise à l'épreuve lorsqu'il tombe amoureux de Lola, sans savoir qu'elle est prostituée et entretenue par un promoteur immobilier corrompu.Dans l'Allemagne de l'Ouest d'après-guerre, le charmant Von Bohm est nommé directeur des travaux publics d'une ville. Sa moralité est mise à l'épreuve lorsqu'il tombe amoureux de Lola, sans savoir qu'elle est prostituée et entretenue par un promoteur immobilier corrompu.
- Réalisation
- Scénario
- Casting principal
- Récompenses
- 4 victoires et 1 nomination au total
- Timmerding
- (as Karl Heinz von Hassel)
Avis à la une
Fassbinder's film Lola, one of his last and the 2nd part of a BDR trilogy he made, is sumptuous melodrama, filmed with such a vibrant and eclectic and varied sense of color with the lighting and sets and costumes- on the faces and bodies and sets- that one can just look at any scene in this and find something fantastically stylized about it. It should be a real horror-show fable, but Fassbinder is something much of a realistic-romantic, if that also makes any sense, in that he thrusts naturalistic actors alongside a few 'personalities' (one of them a great actor playing Schukert, Mario Adolf), among such vibrant sets like the inside of the nightclub and amid the turmoil of the post-war German setting where the economy is finally back in boom (if not for everyone).
Occasionally some of the musical choices- or just the abundance of them in nearly every scene- is a bit much, and I was thrown off by what seemed like maybe too much of a happy ending considering everything tragic that has preceded it (Fassbinder doesn't let his characters completely off the hook, but it feels too clean-cut as well). However Fassbinder is also working on some prime material with a real eye for the harrowing scope of a tragic romance and the means of 'fitting-in' to a urban landscape where, according to Lola, Von Brum doesn't really fit in. It's also got Barbara Sukowa as the title character, obviously in a career-high-point, and Armin Mueller-Stahl in another of a long series of really interesting roles where he can show emotions but very wisely and carefully and appears to be reserved- sometimes deceptively reserved like in Eastern Promises- and for Von Brum it's one of his best.
Anyone who loves a juicy drama of romance and building-capitalist intrigue would do well to watch this. I'm sure it'll be one of Fassbinder's best. 9.5/10
"Lola" is a combination of many genres- satire, drama, comedy, and musical. It mixes glamor with very serious themes. Striking Barbara Sukowa is a singer-whore Lola who sets up to seduce the incorruptible local building commissioner, unbelievably blue-eyed Armin Mueller-Stahl. Lola went through many losses, humiliations, and disappointments during the war and right after it and she wants to be an independent business woman for which she decided to win over the man everyone kept telling was not for her.
As Barbara Sukowa recalls, Fassbinder told the critical stories but he did not make them dry or theoretical. He did not use the intellectual or academic approach to his stories. He hated gray "kitchen" naturalism and he was mixing Hollywood glamor with specific German realities creating his own style that was sexy and appealing. While many German film makers of his generation were influenced by the American directors like Martin Scorsese and John Cassavetes, Fassbinder was very impressed by Douglas Sirk and his style.
Rainer Werner Fassbinder died at the age of 37 just as he was completing his last movie, "Querell". He had made over 30 films during 12 years. He began directing in 1969 revealing in his work New Germany, often heartless and materialistic. Fassbinder's talent and the quantity and quality of his output are incredible. It is like he knew he would die young and he was obsessed by finishing as many films as it was physically possible, majority of which (including "Lola") were way ahead of their time.
Fassbinder wanted to expose the ugly truth wherever it may lie: in response to a question he was once asked by Karlheinz Böhm as to where his political allegiance lay, he stated, 'No matter if it's on the right, left, top or bottom, I shoot in every direction.' Furthermore, some of Fassbinder's films display men at their ugliest and women at their most sympathetic, such as 'Martha', which features Margit Carstensen's character psychologically and emotionally tortured and gaslighted by her monster of a husband (the aforementioned Böhm) to such a degree that she ends the film both emotionally and literally crippled.
'Lola', however, is almost certainly one of the films that will attract the 'misogyny' label from many. The film's protagonist is, simply, a whore. She is unsympathetic, vain and manipulative. Everyone in the film knows that she is a whore (even her own embarrassed mother), with the sole exception of Armin Mueller-Stahl's character, a naive and ageing 'moralist', who falls in love with a mirage, a contrived, fictional version of her.
When Lola finally realises that the wealthy and respectable Von Bohm has fallen in love with her, her reaction is not one of joy or relief, or one of belief that she could potentially escape the ugly world she is trapped in -- instead she coldly realises she has another man with capital to exploit to the emotional bitter end, except this one comes with a ring.
'Do you want to live in a world without morality? A world that's only bad and rotten and corrupt?' Lola is asked. 'I would love to. My only problem is that they do not allow me to take part' is her darkly serious reply. You get the feeling that Lola chose the gutter, that the gutter didn't necessarily choose her; this is in contrast to many films about the 'liberation' of prostitutes.
The film is set in the strange era of immediate post-war Germany, a period in which an entire country awoke from mass hypnosis, literally bombed back into reality; a nation that had to rebuild itself, rediscover its dignity and learn to come to terms with its morass of guilt.
The use of colour filters in Fassbinder's late films is distinctive and powerful, creating a queasy and sleazy mood of the garish underworld; along with 'Querelle', 'Lola' is a great example of this. It's as if Fassbinder took the melodrama of his beloved Douglas Sirk and placed it right in the hungry stomach of Hell.
'Lola' is a strong film: unconventional, creative and fascinating, but it doesn't quite reach the level of brilliance of the other two entries in his 'BRD Trilogy' -- the outstanding 'The Marriage of Maria Braun' from 1979, and the tragic and near-perfect 'Veronika Voss' from the year of his death, 1982.
Barbara Sukowa as Lola, is a magnificent actress, especially where she accepts the humiliations of her life, but will not allow them to transform her into the brutalized animal level of behavior, that she observes all around her. Always optimistic, she pursues her goal {to escape from the prison of degradation, she is in}. We, {the viewers}, follow her journey, as she overcomes obstacle after obstacle, to eventually triumph, and take her place as a citizen of her particular Peyton Place.
How she does it is colorful and informative. Fassbinder gives you all the different strata of class prejudice, as the money men are in cahoots with the bureaucrats, who are all, in turn, driven by libidinal desires. Mixing up cabaret elements, together with the controlling power of money, blended in with, the huge heart of those that earn their crust as sex workers {this, is so obviously where Fassbinder's sympathies lie}. Fassbinder has used high cinematic values in this movie, where all the characters, {ultimately}, believe that "Cash is King". Kitsch is displayed with the usual Fassbinder panache and as with many other movie portrayals of prostitution, the more sordid side, such as violence and intimidation, and the risk to health, are not mentioned, giving the otherwise sharp satire of the corrupt financial world, a rather fairy tale gloss.
Fassbinder, who always understood the paramount need to entertain, still manages to convey the malaise, that the aftermath of the Nazi demolition of all moral standards, which had left an entire nation bereft of a natural ethos of right and wrong. Fassbinder gives you entertainment and awareness, a difficult tightrope to straddle.
Fassbinder, like Diogenes, was always in search of an honest man. He had a celebratory attitude to life, and his mirth is infectious.
Le saviez-vous
- AnecdotesPart of the BRD Trilogy along with Le mariage de Maria Braun (1979) and Le secret de Veronika Voss (1982). "BRD" stands for Bundesrepublik Deutschland, the official name of West Germany and of the united contemporary Germany, period in which those three stories takes place.
- GaffesThe photograph above the mayor's desk shows downtown Houston, Texas as it looked in the 1960s. The film is set in the late 1950s.
- Citations
Lola: Did you love your wife very much?
Von Bohm: I don't really know, perhaps. I came back from the war, and told myself: That's the woman I really love, otherwise I wouldn't have married her. But I didn't feel love. It was just... like the memory of love... Then she told me there was someone else, and for the first time since being back, I really felt something. Not love, but pain. I was thankful to my wife for teaching me how to feel again, even if it was pain.
- ConnexionsEdited into Großes Herz und große Klappe - Helga Feddersen (2001)
- Bandes originalesUnter fremden Sternen
Lyrics by Aldo von Pinelli
Composed by Lotar Olias
(p) 1959 Polydor
Performed by Freddy Quinn
Meilleurs choix
- How long is Lola?Alimenté par Alexa
Détails
- Date de sortie
- Pays d’origine
- Sites officiels
- Langues
- Aussi connu sous le nom de
- Lola
- Lieux de tournage
- Sociétés de production
- Voir plus de crédits d'entreprise sur IMDbPro
Box-office
- Budget
- 3 500 000 DEM (estimé)
- Montant brut aux États-Unis et au Canada
- 8 144 $US
- Week-end de sortie aux États-Unis et au Canada
- 11 623 $US
- 16 févr. 2003
- Montant brut mondial
- 9 530 $US
- Durée1 heure 55 minutes
- Mixage
- Rapport de forme
- 1.66 : 1