Amor e Preconceito

This film has everything one could ask for: astonishing visual intelligence and imagination, wonderfully evocative, impeccably composed images that draw on silent cinema and painting, all perfectly adapted to the very moving story being told, and the period/milieu in which it unfolds: Effie Briest is presented as enclosed in the many different spaces (most of them - especially the interiors - saturated with stifling formality, social rectitude and conformity) through which she moves and in which she lives, or tries to live (the bird in the cage being a transparent symbol of all this). Quite simply, Fassbinder knows - knew - what "mise en scene" really means. The passage of time is brilliantly handled (through, for example, the use of the fade to white, intertitles and a moving voice-over narration), and the cast is flawless, as well as being flawlessly directed. A film of immense dignity and power, yet it somehow remains understated...

Theatrical rigidity becomes part and parcel of R.W. Fassbinder's fetchingly monochromatic period drama, an adaptation of Theodor Fontane's novel, EFFI BRIEST, predominantly accompanied by its own author's ur-texts in voiceover, narration or title cards, stars Hanna Schygulla as our titular heroine, a Prussian young girl consents to the marriage proposal of Baron Geert von Instetten (Schenck), a former suitor of her mother Louise (Pempeit), out of a desire for prestige, although she is only 18, and her husband is over twice of her age.

Fassbinder stridently retains its source novel's poetic realism through the film's gorgeous costumes, furnitures and a repressive air of solemnity, a matter-of-factness in probing into Effi and Geert's turbulent and unbalanced marriage, wherein a trophy wife's seemingly perfect life is under constant gaslighting and doctrinaire manipulation from her haughty husband, and Fassbinder counterintuitively keeps a perverse remove from key incidents, totally relies on wording to elucidate thoughts and relentless long takes to consistently test audience's patience, it is a bold move, but on the strength of the picture's uncannily stylish compositions (mirrors and doors are key partitions to transmit the despondent feeling of alienation, detachment, even cruelty)...

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Exquisite black-and-white photography, gorgeous costumes, stunning landscapes, and actors photographed in mirrors and through laced-curtains are the highlights of this emotionally distant film. It is true, however, that the leading actress has her cathartic scene, but it comes late in the film. Too late to really make one care about the spoiled, rich young lady. But this is Fassbinder, and Fassbinder is always watchable, even at his most pretentious. One joy of this film is the presence of Irm Hermann, who can do more with one glare (she doesn't need dialogue as "The Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant" proved for all time) then any actor I can think of. Schygulla and the other actors are mostly wooden. The beauty of the scene with the starkly handsome Lommel as the rich major and Schygulla picnicking at the beach makes one forgive the shortcomings of the film.

One the tablets used by Fassbinder in this movie (the same method he shall use 6 years later in "Berlin Alexanerplatz") shows the text: "He put her under pressure wherever he could. So-to-say a calculus of fear" (Fontane). As any other calculi, also the calculus of fear consists of theorems. Speaking about the relationship between Von Instetten and Effi, we have: 1. Never treat her without menacing, but do not show the menace open, so that you can deny it after. 2. Isolate her from society, best make her a child as soon as possible so that she does not get bored. 3. Never praise her for what she is doing, unless in the presence of foreigners. 4. Praise her in front of her parents with whom you should establish a good friendship. If she is complaining later about her marriage, the guilt will be given to her.

As the sub-title of the movie says (the longest ever used in a movie): The movie is about those people who are capable to see the unjustness of social rules but don't help changing them, and by doing so, confirm them. "Effi Briest" is therefore a typical Fassbinder movie which he liked to call "melodramas" and thus also a predecessor of his later "women-movies" about Maria Braun, Lola, Lili Marleen and Veronika Voss.

That this film is an outstanding masterpiece has nowadays been recognized by all leading film experts around the world. Although Fassbinder let himself sometimes inspire by works of literature, Fontane's "Effi Briest" is one of his only three explicit literature adaptations, besides "Berlin Alexanderplatz" and "Querelle". One could perhaps go as far and say: While in "Effi Briest", society is criticized at the hand of one single, individual fate, in "Berlin Alexanderplatz" a society as a whole is put in the pillory, and in "Querelle" a possible alternative world after all the disgust is shown. Fassbinder made this long way in societal criticism in only eight years, during which he approached the society of the time in which he lived, by systematically coming closer to reach the 50ies of the 20th century (Lola). His movies can be seen as chronicles of different means of suppression by using calculi which turn out to be independent of time.

I did not find Fassbinder's filmmaking static and boring. I found it brash and exciting. His style is superb. HOWEVER, I have to say that I found the story, with which I am unfamiliar, incredibly bland. How many 19th and early 20th Century novels have this exact same plot? It's the simplistic "fallen wife" scenario without a spark of invention, it seems to me. In that way, I could not stand this film and was trying hard not to pass out. However, Fassbinder's miraculous filmmaking, cinematography, mise-en-scene, direction, music, even the acting, kept me at least interested. I give it a 6/10.