Lola, une femme allemande

Satirical to the core, this movie is interesting in its realistic illustration of post-war small time corruption. Fassbinder has an extraordinary light touch, and it is a fascinating ride through the endemic connivance's of the petit-bourgeois wheeler-dealers of a small German city. One can actually hear Fassbinder giggling in the background as he brings the universal character of the average conformist-hustler to the screen.

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.

This looks absolutely wonderful throughout with astonishingly colourful lighting and much use of red and blue. The drawback is that with all the scenes similarly lit with bright colours a certain level of artifice is created. This is fantastic for the most effective night club scenes but becomes rather distracting elsewhere when we are being asked to take seriously the Blue Angel inspired antics of the well meaning older man and the flighty young dancer. It also distracts somewhat from the financial shenanigans. Overall, however, we get the drift and Fassbinder is once more trying to bring some awareness to a German population in denial, that they did not only loose the war but their very identity in the aftermath with all the divisions brought upon the nation by Russia and the West. Barbara Sukowa stars as the Dietrich type figure and very well she does too as she flirts with the corrupt property developer and the supposed socialist leaning reforming inspector. Awash with the benefits of the 'economic miracle' much helped by the funds plowed in for the rebuild, her actions ensure that the old man gets what he wants, the developer similarly and she sails off into the sunset, immorality levels safely restored.

A common and probably unfair criticism of Fassbinder is that his film-making displayed a darkly misogynistic streak. Truthfully, rather than a misogynist, Fassbinder believed that both sexes were worthy of a good kicking -- he had no political reservations preventing him from showing women at their ugliest and most manipulative. Fassbinder, a man who had sex with both men and women and had complicated and unconventional relationships with members of both sexes, most likely viewed the distinction between men and women as a thin and hazy line; he based 'The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant', a lesbian melodrama with absolutely no male actors in the entire film, on his own experiences with men, after all.

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.

Von Bohm is from East-Prussia, his two "weaknesses" are "East-Prussian human beings and West-Frisian tea", he tells to Lola's mother who works as his house-keeper after he has been elected as the new head of the construction department by the city of Coburg. Coburg - as any German city in the time of the "Wirtschaftswunder" - is a place "where people have an outer and an inner life, and both have nothing to do with one another". Although Von Bohm agrees, he has not a ghost of an idea that the elegant and beautiful young lady who gets his hand-kiss is in her "inner" life the attraction of the local bordello where the "crows" (major, police president, politicians, heads of the governmental departments) and the "vulture" (Schuckert) reunite every evening while their wives are knitting at home or are already asleep.

It is amazing what Fassbinder made out of the Heinrich Mann-Von Sternberg drama "Professor Unrat" or "The Blue Angel", respectively. Fassbinder's Lola is not a man-murdering and at last unreachable "beauty" like the (not so beautiful) Marlene Dietrich, but a girl who has to nourish her little daughter and still has the hope for a better live. She is "open" for everybody and does not flirt with the distance. In the opposite: On the stage she goes from hand to hand and is something like a collective propriety of the "Creme De La Creme" of the little city. (The figure of Esslin - whose name is close to Enslin -, who quotes Bakunin in Lola's Boudoir, is probably the rest that remained from the original protagonist character of Professor Unrat.) Therefore, Fassbinder's Lola is not about the decrease of a society member by entering the "wrong" society, but about her way to become a part of her society and Von Bohm's desire to possess his beloved "object". This is managed in an almost fairy-tale-like style, typically (and ironically) for the Germany of the Adenauer-era, so that in the end everybody looks happy, since everybody got what he wanted: Lola says to Mrs. Schuckert: "Now I belong to you". Schuckert earns his 3 millions of D-Marks from the "Lindenhof", the Mayor will be reelected, and Von Bohm gets Lola. Then, Lola's little daughter asks him: "Are you happy now?". Von Bohm answers a bit hesitatingly by "Yes". Unlike Professor Unrat, he does not pay with his life for his love, but probably with his soul.

Lola (1981) was the second part of director Rainer Werner Fassbinder's celebrated trilogy of films that looked specifically at the period following the end of the Second World War, and in particular, the socio-political and economic re-birth of Germany following the Wirtschaftswunder. All three films in the trilogy look at these situations through the eyes of a strong-willed, arrogant and determined female-protagonist who strives against all odds to achieve the kind of lifestyle that she has always desired, but, once she does, finds herself still feeling empty and lacking in spirit. The characters in these films come to represent Fassbinder's own feelings about the Germany of this particular period, whilst simultaneously acting as an allegorical portrayal and deeper interpretation of the qualities and characteristics of the country itself.

Typical of the director's later works, Lola is a giddy fusion of the filmmaker's key cinematic inspirations and his then political concerns. It was a style and personal ideology that Fassbinder had been building up to with films like In a Year with 13 Moons (1978) and Despair (1978), showing the director's continuing attempts to subvert the conventions of the melodrama by way of narrative experimentation and visual stylisation; a cinematic device that would be further tinkered with in his final films, the bitter Veronika Voss (1982) and the deeply surreal Querelle (1982). Whereas his early films, such as Fear Eats the Soul (1974) and The Merchant of Four Seasons (1972), had developed an astute sense of character, dislocated from a reality that was, in some way, categorically our own, these later-period Fassbinder films seem to disregard actual reality for a more expressive and cinematic depiction. So, whilst those early films may have once given us a depiction of small town life, boardrooms and bordellos that could have easily sprung from a documentary, Lola (and these later films in general) give us a surreal detachment and an arcane theatricality, with music being used to create both mood and atmosphere, as well as scoring the underlining emotions, which, when coupled with that roving camera and sumptuous 'chocolate box' photography, creates some dynamic and astounding moments of cinematic spectacle.

As with most films that can be categorised as melodrama, the story of Lola is deceptively simple. On the one hand the film is a remake of The Blue Angel (1930), replete with similar scenarios, characters and thematic concerns, though the whole thing is elaborated on by the director's interest in social issues, gender roles, human emotions, politics (both modern day and historical) and, as with other filmmakers of the German New Wave, particularly Herzog and Wenders, the role of 'New Germany' under the bleak and unforgiving shadow of the past. Fassbinder couples these issues with the themes of unrequited love, social disgrace and personal tragedy - elements that were so internal in his early work, like Fear Eats the Soul - and makes them external here, tying it all into that gloriously giddy mise-en-scene. This is the kind of film where even the performances are stylised; wavering from understated longing to over-the-top bursts of elation, though never belying the intent of the story of the believability of the character. We also get a separate viewpoint for the story as well, with Fassbinder opening out the proceedings in a way that goes against the original version of The Blue Angel in order to give us more focus on the character Von Bohm - the lonely, up tight businessman who comes to represent a beacon of morality - who falls in love with the showgirl, only to see his initial plight subsequently perverted by those that Lola manages to wrap around her finger. The ultimate rejection and realisation by Von Bohm of Lola's callous manipulation is one of the most crippling and emotionally heart-breaking scenes of Fassbinder's career.

Here, we find Armin Mueller-Stahl as the tortured Von Bohm, staring ahead, his face bathed in red light, the background awash with blue, being given the external visual representation of his hate, anger and general outsider status by Fassbinder's cinematography. From this, we see the strands of corruption and greed, love and longing, jealousy and deceit as the strongest themes of the film, with Barbara Sukowa (as excellent here as she was in von Trier's Europa a decade later) managing to pull off this multi-faceted role that seems to incorporate every single one of those disparate characteristics. Because of this, some have stated that Lola, as a character, is too hard to relate to or sympathise with and, as a result of this, Fassbinder's central message falls flat. I disagree. I believe you have to really analysis Lola's relationship to the town and her relationship with Von Bohm to really understand the contradictory dimensions of the character in relation to the director's sub-textual ideas about Post War Germany, etc.

Lola exists in very much the same cinematic universe as the two other films that would come to form the backbone of what would eventually become known "the BRD trilogy"; though Fassbinder himself had often talked of plans to make more films in a similar vein - analysing post-war German history through to the present day - but was unable to continue the theme due to his untimely death in June of 1982. My only complaint is that the film seems to move a little too slowly on first viewing, but that just means that the viewer will have to work a little harder to follow the plot without being diverted by that sublime cinematography. Lola is, inarguably, one of the high points of latter-period Fassbinder and represents something of a second crossroad within his all-too-short career that - judging from that sprawling epic Berlin Alexanderplatz (1980) and the later, surreal and disturbing Querelle - could have really taken him anywhere!