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| Hanna Schygulla, Wolfgang Schenck, and Ulli Lommel in Effi Briest |
Instetten: Wolfgang Schenck
Major Crampas: Ulli Lommel
Frau Briest: Lilo Pempeit
Herr Briest: Herbert Steinmetz
Roswitha: Ursula Strätz
Johanna: Irm Hermann
Wüllersdorf: Karlheinz Böhm
Director: Rainer Werner Fassbinder
Screenplay: Rainer Werner Fassbinder
Based on a novel by Theodor Fontane
Cinematography: Jürgen Jürges
Art direction: Kurt Raab
Costume design: Barbara Baum
Our ideas of the movie costume drama adapted from a literary source were formed by MGM and Merchant Ivory: Lushly produced, expensively costumed, glamorously cast, but often a little askew from the original novel. So it's informative to see what a writer-director with a determinedly contemporary oeuvre that often features satiric glances at modern life comes up with when he turns his hand to adapting 19th-century literature. Rainer Werner Fassbinder's Effi Briest is based on a novel by Theodor Fontane with which most anglophones (I include myself) are unfamiliar. Instead of lush, it's spare; instead of sweepingly romantic, it's stately and slow; instead of glorious Technicolor, it's filmed in a rich and textured black-and-white. But it's also fascinating and, from all accounts, steadfastly close to the source. Fassbinder even uses dialogue and narration -- he does the voiceovers himself -- straight from the novel. Scenes often end with abrupt whiteouts that some critics liken to turning the page of a book, and there are intertitles in Fraktur, the font used in German books well into the 20th century. It's a film that demands attention -- especially because some of the dialogue and commentary were meant to be read and not spoken, so that they can sometimes feel a little oblique and stilted -- and reflection upon its themes, which center on moral rigidity and the pursuit of social status. Yet Fassbinder also makes it highly cinematic, particularly with his characteristic framing of figures in doorways and mirrors. There is, for example, a key conversation between Instetten and his friend Wüllersdorf that's glimpsed mostly in an ornate mirror with beveled mirrors in its frame, so that we get a fragmented, almost cubist take on the figures seen in it. The story is about the failure of the marriage of lively young Effi to a man who is twice her age when they wed, and her removal from a cosmopolitan household to one in a provincial backwater. The analogous stories are those found in Anna Karenina and Madame Bovary, among other famous novels, but Fassbinder turns his tale of adultery into a sharp indictment of German respect for authority and class -- the time is the late 19th century, but you can clearly see the attitudes that plunged Germany into two world wars. I wouldn't recommend Effi Briest to anyone who isn't already familiar with Fassbinder's work -- it's not a film that reaches out and grabs your attention eagerly -- but I would rank it among his best.
Filmstruck Criterion Channel
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