A condensed version of a Rainer Werner Fassbinder TV film from 1977. Perhaps the pacing was superior in the three-hour original, but the lack of narrative rhythm in the film's present form makes it a grueling experience even for those sympathetic to Fassbinder's enervated view of the world. With a plot that recalls
Madame Bovary, the film recounts the romantic disappointments of a minor official's wife in a small German town. In the late Fassbinder style, the mise-en-scene is heavily clogged with intervening objects, generating his classic theme of the impossibility of love in a materialist society. Yet the characterization of the wife (Elisabeth Trissenaar) has an acrid shrewishness that pushes the film toward blunt misogyny. With Kurt Raab as the pathetically loving husband.
By
Dave Kehr
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