Rainer Werner Fassbinder: Die Sehnsucht der Veronika Voss

Although it was made in 1982, Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s film Die Sehnsucht der Veronika Voss looks like a product of 1955, the time that it depicts. Like Sunset Boulevard, it chronicles the last days of an aging former film starlet and the young man who is drawn into her strange world. Filmed in the style of a black and white Hollywood melodrama, Veronika Voss tells a compelling story on its own, but what really impresses is the way that Fassbinder uses these trappings to dress up a distressing critique of Germany’s place in the world.

When humble newspaper man Robert Krohn first befriends Veronika, he does not recognize her, but she either doesn’t notice or just chooses not to. She seduces him like a predator desperate for one last meal, and Krohn is easy prey. But as he becomes curious about her life, and the more he realizes that Veronika has fallen far from the peak of her stardom.

Veronika spends most of her time in an odd little psychiatric clinic. The lobby looks normal enough at first, but the further the film delves into the clinic the weirder it seems. Room are connected to each other by indoor windows and twisty hallways, and everything is decorated in white. Fassbinder creates the impression of a whitewashed maze that circles in on itself, and echoing up from deep in the centre of the maze comes the sound of a radio that’s always tuned to American hillbilly music. It’s never clear where exactly the music is coming from, but it’s always loudest in Veronika’s small room at the clinic, especially during her most desperate moments.

In a film that so ably apes 1950s melodramas, the bizarre American music stands out as the only really avant-garde element, and it is striking. There is also an African American GI who rather inexplicably seems to work at the clinic, or at least is always hanging around there. Fassbinder seems to be trying to draw a connection between the United States and the psychiatric clinic, and I think ultimately he’s making a statement about Germany’s dependence on American foreign aide after World War II.

The clinic primarily works as an underground morphine dispensary. Patients become addicts in order to numb their pain, and become dependent not just on morphine, but on the clinic itself. The clinic assumes control over their lives and assets, until the patient has nothing left to give.

Both of the patients that Fassbinder introduces us to have been nearly destroyed by World War II – Veronika’s fortunes and film career have been in decline ever since the end of the war, and the other patient is a wealthy and elderly Holocaust survivor. The clinic gives them comfort, but at the price of their freedom and identity.

By equating the morphine clinic to American intervention in German affairs, Fassbinder offers a critique of his country’s reliance on outside assistance, and it must have struck a chord with the German psyche, because Veronika Voss won best film at the Berlin International Film Festival upon its release.

Because I had to miss the first three films in the Fassbinder series, I can’t compare this film to the others that were shown, which is a shame! This was the first Fassbinder film I have seen, but I hope it will not be the last.

1970s Conspiracy Films: Winter Kills

When director William Richert first walked onto the set of his film Winter Kills, he wasn’t sure how a 35mm camera worked because he had never seen one up close. He was almost a complete novice, untested except for a few short documentaries, but he somehow managed to assemble a rather extraordinary cast a crew. The supporting roles went to actors like Elizabeth Taylor, Toshiro Mifune and Anthony Perkins, with Jeff Daniels and John Huston as the leads. For cinematography Richert had the legendary Vilmos Zsigmond, who had just won an Academy Award for Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and for production design he had the equally great Robert F. Boyle, a personal favorite of Alfred Hitchcock.

Working from his own script, a comic adaptation of the novel by James Condon, Richert intended to make Winter Kills into a sort of conspiracy theory Alice in Wonderland, the Kennedy Assassination seen through the rabbit hole. Daniels plays the sheltered half-brother of a president who was gunned down nineteen years ago and when clues about the murder begin to come to light, he is drawn into a bizarre world of conspiracies and paranoia where clues lead back on each other like a Gordian knot.

Winter Kills is deliberately confusing and often just plain weird, but it the tone is somewhere between satirical slapstick and bleak absurdity. It often feels like a half-decent shot at making Coen Brothers movie, although it predates the Coens’ first film by half a decade. Come to think, it might make a decent double bill with The Big Lebowski, another offbeat piece of Americana with Jeff Daniels haplessly trying to decipher a mystery. Daniels turns in a solid performance in Winter Kills, but it’s John Huston as the cheerfully corrupt Joe Kennedy-type patriarch who really steals the show. His character is an unrepentant crook of the worst kind, but Huston plays him with such exuberance that he almost becomes lovable, though always detestable.

The film is very funny and imaginative, but it stumbles in places and frequently feels flat and uneven. Perhaps this is Richert’s inexperience as a director showing, although the production problems faced by the film are also a likely culprit.

Financed by a couple of gangsters who had gotten tired of producing soft-core porn movies and were ready for the big time (which explains some of the movie’s gratuitous nudity), Winter Kills was probably on shaky ground from the beginning. There are reports of people being paid in cash by dubious means, and then eventually they stopped being paid at all. The union closed down production on the film at least twice, one producer was executed gangland style and another ended up behind bars. Amazingly, there was a two–year gap in filming, during which Richert gathered up the available Winter Kills cast and crew and made another film in Germany called The American Success Company that somehow made enough money for Richert to finish Winter Kills.

Considering the circumstances, it’s a miracle that the film was made at all. But despite good reviews, Winter Kills was pulled from theaters after just two weeks in release, and it virtually disappeared after that. It was never screened on television and has had a spotty history on home video and DVD. It could be that audiences in 1979 simply didn’t respond to this peculiar little film. Or perhaps, as Condon has suggested, it was pulled from release because the distributor had ties with the Kennedy dynasty, who demanded that they bury the movie.

Who know? In the film, conspiracies only fall away to hide further conspiracies, so perhaps this is a case of life imitating art … or is it the other way around.

1970s Conspiracy Films: Invasion of the Body Snatchers

Although several scenes seemed to be lifted straight from my childhood nightmares, I wasn’t scared by the 1978 version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers while watching it in the theatre. After I went to sleep that night though, that’s when it got to me. Scenes from the movie invaded my dreams, and when I woke up in the middle of the night I was almost afraid to go back to sleep, lest I be replaced by an alien vegetable doppelganger.

Unlike a lot of horror movies, there aren’t a lot of shocks or “gotchas” in this incarnation of Body Snatchers. Instead, it relies on those creeping feelings of dread and paranoia that I’m sure many children have felt while lying awake in bed – “What if the people I love suddenly stop loving me?” “What if I go to sleep and won’t ever wake up?” “What if evil takes over my whole town?” “What if I have to escape but there’s no where to run?”

Unlike this season’s other great horror film, Eraserhead, which took place in an abstract, dreamlike reality, “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” feels grounded in a specific time and place. Through a style that mixes German expressionism with New Hollywood grittiness, director Philip Kaufman places the invasion very clearly in late ‘70s San Francisco. This, combined with the way his characters feel like real people with jobs and dreams and not just fodder for the aliens, makes the film feel much more serious than its premise would indicate.

The three leads all face struggles that are related to the theme of being surrounded by imposters. Donald Sutherland plays a health inspector whose job it is to find the phonies in the restaurant world – early in the film he finds what a chef is claiming is a caper is actually a rat turd. His co-worker, played by Brooke Adams, is living with a boyfriend in a stale and emotionless relationship, a pale imitation of the genuine love she could have with Sutherland. And Jeff Goldblum is a writer who is distressed by how easily the public is swayed by books that have no heart to them while dismissing the work that he pours his soul into. W. D. Richter’s script highlights just how easily fake things can infiltrate and corrupt our reality.

When it moves out of the realm of social commentary into the nitty-gritty alien invasion stuff, the script doesn’t hold up quite as well. Aside from recurring shots of mysterious grey material being disposed of, the way the aliens work seems a bit illogical and inconsistent. In a lot of horror films it might not be as much of an issue, but the leaps of logic required to buy some of the mechanics of pod people don’t always mesh with Invasion’s general level of verisimilitude.

Fortunately, the special effects work is so outstanding, not to mention extremely disgusting, that it’s easy to forgive how outlandish the whole thing is. The scenes of pod people being born don’t make a lot of sense, but they are so stomach-churning nightmarish that it doesn’t matter. Ultimately though it’s the ideas behind Invasion of the Body Snatchers that make it disturbing. The damning final shot includes no visual effects at all, but it will stick with audiences long after they’ve managed to repress the memories of the more graphic and gory scenes.