Beneath the whorey garishness of Fassbinder's Lola beats a battered, world-weary heart. The image, splashed with colored light, sugar-purple and jade-green, is all painted up for the evening, but underneath lies the dragging melancholy, the mirthlessness of Petra Von Kant (whose painted face looked like a doll's). The only happy man is Von Bohm, the building commissioner, who knows his place in the world, his purpose: Re-build Germany at all costs; cover over the scars of war, the raw wounds of Fascism, with new development, new steel towers. Von Bohm the shameless capitalist (follow the surface rules, break all the underlying moral ones) is even in love - he just doesn't know who his lover really is. If he knew it would be different - if he were aware of the innocent, psalm-singing, polka-dot-dress wearing frau's real life as a singer/whore steaming up the nightclub scene with his dissipated, morally constipated colleagues, then he would not be so in love. For Von Bohm is a romantic, the last one maybe, the last decent man in Germany. There is steel in his eyes (Fassbinder shines slashes of light across his face, showing us the steel) and there is steel in his heart, at least at first.
Barbara Sukowa plays Lola, the temptress of many guises. There are moments of delirium in her performance to bring back memories of Madeline Kahn in Blazing Saddles, the parody of Marlene Dietrich, but mostly there is raw carnality wedded to a strange, predatory ugliness not far from Hanna Schygulla's in that supreme Fassbinder masterpiece, The Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant (the thesis statement of a philosopher of manipulation). The Emil Jannings to Sukowa's Dietrich is Armin Mueller-Stahl (in later years the poster-boy of Eastern European grandfatherly gentleness), a dignified man doomed by his lusts, his inability to assimilate lust into his picture of a balanced, just world. What makes Lola different, not The Blue Angel, is how Fassbinder ties the scenario, the downfall-of-an-uptight man, to politics, to the realities (his version of them anyway) of The Economic Miracle. Lola the whore tempts Von Bohm the upstanding man, and upon discovering her true identity Von Bohm, sent into a tailspin of grief, rebels against the callously capitalistic forces behind the re-construction, the new hope of Germany. He becomes an unwilling socialist. He seeks to reform the department. But then there are his lusts, which care nothing for his dignity, his honesty, his judgment. There can only be one outcome, this being the jaded, supremely cynical world of Fassbinder. In the end there is no decency that can withstand the forces of capitalism; there is no morality that can withstand the charms of the whore.
If it were not so schematic it might be brilliant, but Fassbinder, desperate to get his point across, resorts to didacticism. Mostly the film is an opportunity to bathe in comic-strip colors more bold and garish than anything seen since the hay-day of sixties excess. There is not a true flesh-tone in the entire film. There is a decadence too rotted to be voluptuous but enjoying itself anyway, enjoying its moments of ecstasy, its commensurate plunges into despair. The film's point is too obvious, too boldly underlined, too all-pervading, but there is life beneath the themes, the politics, the anti-capitalism. There is Barbara Sukowa in her underwear, showing off her fantastic body, and there is the poignant optimism of Armin Mueller-Stahl, none of Jannings' overwrought play-acting, his expressionistic self-indulgence. There is class-consciousness, the brutal comedy of a dinner-party prepared by an East Prussian housekeeper, her native cuisine mocked by a narrow-minded German elitist (Irm Hermann, less moribund than usual). There is the satire of a bourgeois man's first television (it gets only one channel). There is a rollicking-but-sad song to recall Dietrich, the song of the nightclub girl all the men love but none respect; the song of past-midnight longing, of hopes hopelessly lost.
Barbara Sukowa plays Lola, the temptress of many guises. There are moments of delirium in her performance to bring back memories of Madeline Kahn in Blazing Saddles, the parody of Marlene Dietrich, but mostly there is raw carnality wedded to a strange, predatory ugliness not far from Hanna Schygulla's in that supreme Fassbinder masterpiece, The Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant (the thesis statement of a philosopher of manipulation). The Emil Jannings to Sukowa's Dietrich is Armin Mueller-Stahl (in later years the poster-boy of Eastern European grandfatherly gentleness), a dignified man doomed by his lusts, his inability to assimilate lust into his picture of a balanced, just world. What makes Lola different, not The Blue Angel, is how Fassbinder ties the scenario, the downfall-of-an-uptight man, to politics, to the realities (his version of them anyway) of The Economic Miracle. Lola the whore tempts Von Bohm the upstanding man, and upon discovering her true identity Von Bohm, sent into a tailspin of grief, rebels against the callously capitalistic forces behind the re-construction, the new hope of Germany. He becomes an unwilling socialist. He seeks to reform the department. But then there are his lusts, which care nothing for his dignity, his honesty, his judgment. There can only be one outcome, this being the jaded, supremely cynical world of Fassbinder. In the end there is no decency that can withstand the forces of capitalism; there is no morality that can withstand the charms of the whore.
If it were not so schematic it might be brilliant, but Fassbinder, desperate to get his point across, resorts to didacticism. Mostly the film is an opportunity to bathe in comic-strip colors more bold and garish than anything seen since the hay-day of sixties excess. There is not a true flesh-tone in the entire film. There is a decadence too rotted to be voluptuous but enjoying itself anyway, enjoying its moments of ecstasy, its commensurate plunges into despair. The film's point is too obvious, too boldly underlined, too all-pervading, but there is life beneath the themes, the politics, the anti-capitalism. There is Barbara Sukowa in her underwear, showing off her fantastic body, and there is the poignant optimism of Armin Mueller-Stahl, none of Jannings' overwrought play-acting, his expressionistic self-indulgence. There is class-consciousness, the brutal comedy of a dinner-party prepared by an East Prussian housekeeper, her native cuisine mocked by a narrow-minded German elitist (Irm Hermann, less moribund than usual). There is the satire of a bourgeois man's first television (it gets only one channel). There is a rollicking-but-sad song to recall Dietrich, the song of the nightclub girl all the men love but none respect; the song of past-midnight longing, of hopes hopelessly lost.