Cinema: Master Without Masterpieces Andres Segovia: 1893-1987

LOLA and VERONIKA VOSS Directed by Rainer Werner Fassbinder Screenplays by Peter Märthesheimer and Pea Fröhlich

Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s death in June, at 36, had all the garish contradictions of the film maker’s melodramas. The police diagnosis—overdose of sleeping pills and cocaine—pointed up the standard celebrity moral of too much work, too many indulgences, too little time. For those moviegoers who had seen the Bavarian-born director at film festivals or spotted him in his own pictures, his death, impossible to imagine, became in retrospect easy to predict. Chronically scraggly and overweight, encased in dark glasses and neck-to-ankle black leather, skulkingly showboating his eminence, he looked the very model of a pestilential dandy, a sure bet for early burnout.

For Fassbinder, though, the end—especially his own—must have been more a shrug than a suicide. In a preposterously prolific career (some 40 films, and many theater pieces, in 13 years), he had always viewed the soul’s most traumatic ructions as blips on an electrocardiogram. The detachment was not merely ironic. Two mismatched mates could come together and drift apart, as they did in Alt: Fear Eats the Soul; a hard-won life could blow up in its heroine’s face, as it did in The Marriage of Maria Braun; a cunning mind could schuss down the Alps of dementia, as it did in Despair; and Fassbinder would watch, and show. He was a camera—one that hummed relentlessly until the end. More than a dozen Fassbinder films still await U.S. release.

He was a master without masterpieces. Instead of singular pictures, his body of work suggests a group portrait: one vast, remarkable family, with genetic similarities more noticeable than the vagrant differences in individual ambition, audacity or achievement. Each sibling carries his or her own snapshots: the weary hostility that spills across a kitchen table in The Merchant of Four Seasons; the riff of revenge in The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant when a quiet young woman walks out on her longtime dominatrix to the bluesy strains of The Great Pretender; the logger-heading of fear and desire in a dozen Fassbinder movies, where the lighting is lurid, the sound track crackles with tinny music and drunken threats, the air reeks of death sweat. Each film is incomplete without the others. Each contributes its chapter to the 100-hour autobiography.

Fassbinder’s own story begins in 1946, with a physician father and a mother who translated Truman Capote into German. “It was a chaotic house,” he recalled in 1975. “The normal bourgeois order was not valid.”

Nonetheless, in film after profligate film he described the fatal charm of the bourgeoisie for any working-class striver, or anyone too idealistic to recognize its strangling power. In 1978 Fassbinder was lucky enough to find a pair of screenwriters, Peter Märthesheimer and Pea Fröhlich, who set this theme in ’50s Germany, and retooled it with more dexterity than Fassbinder had shown in his own scripts. The result of this collaboration was a trilogy—Maria Braun (1979), Lola (1981) and Veronika Voss (1982)—that blended movie melodramas with acerbic sociology, and revealed the curse behind the country’s “economic miracle.” They transformed the director from a cult commodity to a mainstream moneymaker.

Both Lola and Veronika Voss are set in 1955. Lola (Barbara Sukowa) works in a Coburg bordello: chanteuse for the early show, and after that “the woman with the sweetest ass in NATO” for the town’s corrupt burghers. Von Bohm (Armin Mueller-Stahl) is an honest public official whose idea of an evening’s entertainment is to watch the test pattern on his new TV set. Unaware of Lola’s occupation, Von Bohm takes her on a date to church—such are the idealist’s hopes for a spiritually healthy postwar Germany—and falls in love with her. The Blue Angel trajectory is established: Von Bohm must discover, understand, compromise, surrender. Fassbinder has lighted this ordinary nightmare as if every boardroom, bedroom and bathroom were on the top floor of the worst little whorehouse in Bavaria: neon pinks and oranges in the toilets, navy blue seats against a sick-yellow wall, clashing as grotesquely as the local big shots do against the righteous Von Bohm. Their avarice is petty bourgeois, the stuff of small-town scandals in any country, but Fassbinder’s mise en scene suggests that the subject, as well as the style, is Early Hitler.

Veronika Voss (Rosel Zech) wants her substance and style to be Golden Age Hollywood. Like Sybille Schmitz, the German actress on whose life and perplexing death the film is based, Veronika is an aging movie star on the way down and out. For Veronika, the ’40s were all beautiful music and the caress of a soft-focus lens; the ’50s are jangly cowboy songs and cruel chiaroscuro. Propelled by her screenwriter husband (who fades out of his own picture), her producer (who finds younger actresses for his casting couch), her neurologist (who ladles out morphine) and a curious reporter (who cannot escape the lure of decadence), Veronika travels down Sunset Boulevard to a dead end. Fassbinder’s black-and-white palette turns neon into a soft, blinking Cyclops eye, slices light into flickers with an overhead fan, dapples windows with rain stains, all to re-create the visual style in which Veronika could feel at home and alive. As she sings in a final drugged reverie that reunites the featured players of her life, “Memories are made of this.” She dies, as her creator would, in an overdose of glory.

There are some ironies, of the life-imitates-art variety, that only fate is shameless enough to stage. In 1975 Fassbinder played the lead role of an upwardly mobile homosexual in his own Fox and His Friends. At film’s end he lies dead of an overdose in a Munich subway station, his pockets rifled by street urchins who may grow up, and end up, like Fox. In real life such a death, with its eerily obvious parallels, would be too pat, too sentimental in its pessimism for this icy-eyed film maker. He was obsessed with the morality of social ambition, but he preserved those obsessions in a medium, and an oeuvre, that should outlive all those who mourn his death. The camera is stilled. The projector keeps clicking. The burnout burns bright. —By Richard Corliss