Maria Braun is a product of survivalism. Reduced by war and loss to a struggle just to eat and breathe, she becomes a hardened soul. It's easy to suggest that she is Germany through Fassbinder's eyes (and perhaps this is so), but I think of her more as symbolic of any people under capitalism. She becomes ruthless and materialistic. The love of her life is a memory to her, regardless of his vital state, and her motivations, whatever they were before the marriage and war, become about advancing financially more than anything else. To her, love is to be pushed aside, to be manipulated, to be controlled. Even in her most compassionate moments, she is driven to violence.

That she…

My third viewing. I liked it plenty after both the first and the second. But it is only this third time around that it managed to properly seep under my skin and move me more intensely than any other Fassbinder film - even the more baldly tragic (and nearly as sublime) Fox and His Friends.

And it's funny that, while this was unquestionably Fassbinder's greatest popular success, it never seems to have been considered his defining masterpiece, which I would argue it is. (That's right, I'm dropping the m-word!)

There is something so strikingly and cleanly devastating about the way Maria conceives this great love, and compartmentalises it away - or at least leaves a space for it deep inside…

The honky-tonk, stuck-in-a-Mae-West-flick stiltedness of this Fassbinder allegory is sure to turn more than a few people off. But stick with it; the Fass might teach us something yet.

For the truths Rainer Werner Fassbinder wants to present in Marriage of Maria Braun, the stiltedness pays off. Maria—a deliciously callous, yet fiercely loyal, yet oddly self-sustaining, yet disaffected and slavish boor—is a cruel contradiction. She is the embodiment of a postwar Germany still trying to make sense of its place in a world and its role in causing, then turning a blind eye to, the Holocaust. Integration, as Fassbinder conceives it, equals amnesia. Going back to the way things were before the war—as William Wyler and Yasujiro Ozu could conceivably…

I really just don’t care for movies where the sole point is that the character is a sociopathic capitalist solely looking out for themselves. Nightcrawler, Story of Women, and this all have that thread in common. But where Nightcrawler has some intense sequences, the other two are more couched in drama and brutality of choices.

Focusing in on this film, it opens WONDERFULLY. Absolutely love it. And I was 100% on board with the film up until Maria’s black lover exunts the film in a pretty absurd way. From there it just maintains its path and shows Maria being an increasingly messed up sack of shit. 

Special attention deserves to be paid to her dialogue which, more often than not,…