The Merchant of Four Seasons (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1972)

Hans Hirschmüller and Irm Hermann in The Merchant of Four Seasons

Hans Epp: Hans Hirschmüller
Irmgard Epp: Irm Hermann
Anna Epp: Hanna Schygulla
Harry Radek: Klaus Löwitsch
Anzell: Karl Scheydt
Renate Epp: Andrea Schober
Mother Epp: Gusti Kreissl
Hans's Great Love: Ingrid Caven
Kurt: Kurt Raab
Heidi: Heidi Simon

Director: Rainer Werner Fassbinder
Screenplay: Rainer Werner Fassbinder
Cinematography: Dietrich Lohmann
Production design: Kurt Raab

Schlubby little (much is made of how much shorter he is than his wife) Hans Epp joined the Foreign Legion after washing out of the Munich police force for receiving a blowjob from a prostitute he had arrested, and now sells fruit from a pushcart he trundles through the courtyards of apartment houses. He is the object of scorn from his family because he never found a white-collar job, unlike his upwardly mobile brother-in-law and his intellectual sister Anna. His wife assists him in the fruit-selling business, working from a street stall, but it's clear that their marriage is troubled -- she spies on him at work, counting the minutes that he takes to deliver a bagful of pears to the woman he once proposed to. (She turned him down.) Even his mother doesn't love him: When he returns from the Foreign Legion and tells her that the friend who enlisted with him was killed, she retorts, "The good die young, but you come back." When he suffers a heart attack, his wife cheats on him while he's in the hospital, and then later lets him hire the man she slept with to take over the heavy-lifting part of the job. Despite all that's stacked against him, Hans manages to make a go as a merchant, but just as his family begins to praise him instead of dumping on him, he sinks into a deep depression and winds up drinking himself to death. If this all sounds terribly heavy-handed, it's lifted out of the suds in precisely the way Douglas Sirk made his films rise about their soap-operatic plots with sharp-eyed direction, flashes of wit, and sly social comment. The comparison to Sirk is an obvious one: Rainer Werner Fassbinder's breakthrough film was inspired by his study of the Hollywood master, whom he deliberately set out to imitate and, I think, managed to excel, if only because he wasn't handicapped by the money-making concerns and censorship of American film. There are some delicious performances, not only from Hans Hirschmüller as the sad-sack Hans and Irm Hermann as his sly helpmeet, but also from Hanna Schygulla as the somewhat sympathetic Anna. And the film ends with one of the most chilling exchanges in any Fassbinder film, as Irmgard and Harry, Hans's old Legionnaire buddy who has gone to work for him, drive away from the funeral and she proposes a business-like marriage to him. His terse reply, "Okay," perfectly sums up the emotionless, mercantile tone that pervades the film.

World on a Wire (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1973)

What we call "reality" is, as we all know now, a construct, the product of the limitations of our senses. But what if we, too, are part of the construct, put here by some other entity and blinded to the reality that lies beyond the senses? That way lies religion -- "Now we see through a glass darkly...." -- and metaphysics -- now largely dismissed as "asking unanswerable questions" -- but also science fiction. Witness the popularity of a film like The Matrix (Lana Wachowski and Lilly Wachowski, 1999) and its sequels. In fact, Rainer Werner Fassbinder got there more than two decades before the Wachowskis. In 1973 he created a two-part television series, World on a Wire, that aired in Germany, and then became a kind of cult hit via file-sharing on the internet before being restored in 2010 and screened at the Berlin Film Festival. In it, a German research institute has created a simulated world in its supercomputer. The inhabitants of this world have been given consciousness, but only one of them has knowledge of the world outside the computer. He serves as a contact between the programmers and the simulated beings. But then the sudden death of the head of the program puts his second-in-command, Stiller (Klaus Löwitsch), in charge of investigating not only the death of his predecessor but also the suicide of one of the simulated beings. Stranger and stranger things begin to happen, until Stiller learns that he is also a simulation in his own simulated world. He also learns that the institute's simulated world is being used for commercial purposes, something that violates its agreement with the government funding it. As he comes to terms with this knowledge, his increasingly erratic behavior makes him a target for assassins, and his one hope is to find the contact with the level above that's simulating him. Got that? The head-spinning premise of the film comes from a novel, Simulacron-3, by the American writer Daniel F. Galouye, adapted by Fassbinder and Fritz Müller-Scherz. Fassbinder gives it a good deal of his characteristic style in the adaptation: The women in Stiller's world, for example, always wear cocktail dresses, even at work, and rooms are filled with mirrors to suggest the layers of reflected reality in the three levels. The costume designer is Gabriele Pillon and the production design is by Horst Giese, Walter Koch, and Kurt Raab. It was filmed in 16 mm for television, which means there's some graininess and focus problems in some parts of the restored film, but the cinematography is by Fassbinder's frequent collaborator Michael Ballhaus, along with Ulrich Prinz. Löwitsch is very good as Stiller, taking on kind of James Bondian role, and the paranoid atmosphere prevails even when the plot gets a bit snarled in its own premise.

The Marriage of Maria Braun (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1979)

Fassbinder's inspiration was the Hollywood "woman's picture," which made stars of Norma Shearer, Joan Crawford, and Bette Davis in the 1930s and '40s, but more specifically the 1950s version directed by his fellow German, Douglas Sirk (born Hans Detlef Sierck). Sirk brought a distinct style, including vivid Technicolor and high fashion, to his tales of women struggling to assert themselves in a decade usually known for its backlash against liberated women. They were vehicles for actresses like Jane Wyman (Magnificent Obsession, 1954, and All That Heaven Allows, 1955), Lauren Bacall and Dorothy Malone (Written on the Wind, 1956), and Lana Turner (Imitation of Life, 1959). Hanna Schygulla evokes all of them and more in a bravura performance in The Marriage of Maria Braun, in which she gets to suffer through World War II and its aftermath, and to triumph in the postwar German Wirtschaftswunder of the 1950s and '60s. It's a sardonic story about a woman who claims to be faithful in her fashion to Hermann Braun (Klaus Löwitsch), the soldier she married during an air raid in 1943, despite her affairs with a black American soldier (George Eagles) and a French industrialist (Karl Oswald). In Fassbinder's hands, the story of Maria Braun becomes overlaid with the history of Germany after the war, including scenes in which the dialogue is often partly obscured by radio speeches by German politicians like Konrad Adenauer, the architect of German recovery. "I prefer making miracles rather than waiting for them," Maria proclaims at one point. Fassbinder's portrait of Maria is occasionally elliptical: We don't know, for example, whether she aborted the child she conceived with the American soldier or lost it in childbirth, partly because she seems indifferent to the fact, and Fassbinder leaves it up to us to decide whether the explosion in which she dies at the end is an accident or suicide. The screenplay by Pea Fröhlich and Peter Märthesheimer was based on an idea by Fassbinder, who also contributed to the dialogue. The cinematography is by Michael Ballhaus.