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)
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"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'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
None of the characters are likable they are all seedy local politicians, after all, but they slowly grow on us. Schukert, in particular takes some getting used to. Fassbinder takes delight in showing us that everyone is corrupt even apparently incorruptible people. Everyone has a weakness, which is their price. Both money and desire corrupts and debases it's inevitable - you might as well be practical about it, take pity on yourself and embrace it. In particular, corruption is the price of having eroticism in the world and that's something we can't do without.
As the film goes along, the darkish tone gives way to levity once you realise that nobody is really going to get hurt. There are some genuinely pensive and romantic moments as well as some fairly gently humour - Von Bohm's neurotic secretary is quite funny. Very little is convincing though - particularly the Von Bohm's infatuation (he seems a little too old, and a little too naive) and the outcome is even less so. There's very little reliable sociology going on here. Women are viewed as chattels and Lola herself is not really given an adequate personality nor was Barbara Sukowa noteworthy in the part.
It's worth watching if only for it's striking visual design. The film is lit throughout in lurid primary colours even outside in broad daylight faces are bathed in coloured light. Perhaps these colours spread outwardly from the nightclub's red light, diffracting through the ordinary world into rainbow hues. It is sometimes intrusive, but mainly effective and attractive.
Fassbinder has extracted one aspect of social behaviour and amplified it to absurdity here. This is not the way the world is, but is perhaps the way he would like it to be: fallible and corrupt, but erotic and benign.
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