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…

I confess it difficult for me to scrape my feelings and thoughts about The Marriage of Maria Braun into an articulate audit, much less one worthy of its due. My first encounter with Rainer Werner Fassbinder, I’m ashamed to admit, far exceeded my tepid expectations—this film transfixed me, ransacking my subconscious while I was under its spell, and I stirred from its sorcery desolate, heartbroken and grieving.

Maria is a woman after my own heart, possessed by Hanna Schygulla in a commanding performance; a newlywed bride left alone to navigate the confusion of post-war Germany when her soldier husband, Hermann doesn’t return from his final mission. She haunts the dusty train station and rubble-filled streets waiting for her husband to…

"The truth's what you have in your belly when you're hungry; feelings are what you have between your legs like an itch that you scratch."

With adamant resolve Maria and Hermann discharge the titular nuptials amidst an Allied bombing raid, but their union will prove an elusive one. Hermann ships off for combat and the remainder of Rainer Werner Fassbinder's phenomenal The Marriage of Maria Braun follows the indefatigable Maria (a transfixing Hanna Schygulla) as she appears to cannily navigate the vicissitudes of the Second World War, the resultant period of post-war austerity and the eventual Wirtschaftswunder (economic miracle) forged through currency reform and enhanced production. Through Maria's headlong pursuit of an idealized future to be attained at any cost,…

The Marriage of Maria Braun. A masterpiece. The visual style is impressive but mostly dedicated to dramatic effect: the low-angle tracking shot of Maria finding Bill after Hermann is reported dead, for instance, seems essentially a dramatic device. The writing is spectacular, world-class: not just witty and striking, but always pulling us back to the broader characterization, and always combined with a Sternbergian sense of people’s mystery. Maria is of course a symbol of the spirit of amoral post-war capitalist West Germany - but what an unusual character Fassbinder chose for that symbol: energetic, devoted to love, painfully honest, admirable in many ways but unsentimental about culture, fidelity, etc. She’s one of Fassbinder’s greatest characters, anchored in our sympathy by…

Criterion Collection Spine #204
(Foreign language film)

The wife of a soldier in post World War 2 German takes her fate into her own hands with explosive results.

"I don't care what people think. I do care what you think. And you're not having an affair with me. I'm having an affair with you."

First I want to give a shout out to my long time Letterboxd buddy Max Rothman who recommend that I start with this film to begin my journey through the work of German Director Rainer Werner Fassbinder.

In my hobby of watching and reviewing as many films as I can, it is rare that a film sticks in my memory for several days like this one…

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…

Though it has a fantastic opening and fantastic ending, The Marriage of Maria Braun ends up being flat for a good amount of its runtime. It particularly lost me during most of its second half. The film didn’t feel as strong as its first half, and I started to focus my attention elsewhere. That didn’t mean I detested it or anything of the sort. It’s got an enjoyable story about a woman in Germany during World War II, and her life after her husband goes missing in the war. The direction the story went in surprised me at times. At least, in that first half. 

Hanna Schygulla is great as Maria. She’s a memorable protagonist who’s portrayed well. The rest…