Martha

I was so amazed by this genius, the way that Fassbinder holds his camera as if it was his own child. I've rarely seen somebody mastering the art of camera as much as Fassbinder does. He's all over it, he sees beyond the human eye. The shot where Martha meets Helmuth for the first time in Roma is amazing... my heart stopped for about 3 seconds... I couldn't believe what I just saw...I saw this shot many times but I was afraid that I might loose interest in it if I kept playing it again and again. But I didn't. As for the story, it is very beautiful indeed, strange and disturbing. It's one of the best filmed movie ever done in my opinion. Don't miss it.

A great movie, made in a special way. Not only was it made for TV, it has the style of a soap-opera. Those who have seen it must have noticed that there are a number of "episodes", separated by a gradual darkening of the screen (till completely black, then lightening up again). The acting, the decor and so on are pure soap-opera. Some reviewers have seen a touch or two of Douglas Sirk, but there's more than that to it: when Martha gives her German address in the embassy, the name of the street is "Douglas Sirk"! Pure melodrama, but with great results. Fassbinder gives the movie the necessary pace to portray a convincing tragedy resulting from fatality mixed with individual characteristics. The final words appropriately are "When God takes a step, man cannot change it".

Martha, the titular character of Rainer Fassbinder's 1974 made for TV (but nonetheless acclaimed) film Martha is the kind of character I detest more than any other. If there is one characteristic that defines her it is weakness. Her weakness can be seen from the very beginning, as an early scene shows her as she runs away from an emergency situation. Later, shortly after the death of her father, she begins to try things that her father had forbid her to do; thus it becomes clear that her will has been subsumed by that of her parent. Nonetheless, Martha leads a fairly happy life until she marries a domineering sadist. A good portion of the film portrays her sickening subservience to this petty tyrant and the pitiful efforts she makes to change her situation inevitably worsen it because they are so passive and ineffectual. The plot of this film makes for a maddeningly unpleasant viewing experience.

At the same time, Fassbinder's film-making powers are never less than formidable, particularly in some of the earlier sequences here. Fassbinder sets the early, happy scenes in vast, richly decorated interiors. There are a lot of interesting juxtapositions created through the use of mirror images and unusual angles. Exterior scenes are also visually sumptuous, a bit like the work of French New Wave director Eric Rohmer, Academy ratio and all. Later, as the film turns more miserable the interiors seem to shrink and their uniform lack of design reflect Martha's new hopelessness. The exteriors seem to grow into vast wildernesses at the cost of their former beauty. Needless to say, Fassbinder is adept at using a character's surrounding (and the mise en scene) to suggest that character's mood.

This is the third Fassbinder film I've seen and I must say that while I haven't been blown away by any of his films, his direction remains a strong point in each one. No doubt I'll eventually see one where the other aspects of the film are just as satisfying as the direction. Martha is not that film but it does increase my appreciation for Fassbinder's artistry.

What makes Martha a difficult sit may be hard to communicate in words as the entire atmosphere that Rainer Werner Fassbinder creates is suffocating and strange and deliberately uncomfortable. It's his take on what one might see today actually in Fifty Shades of Grey to an extent, though there's no BDSM (some sex though, and extremely the rough kind), or also to a larger extent Gaslight. The thesis is this: when a woman meets a man who is completely incapable of really being a caring, empathetic person, one of two things will happen - the woman will leave the man (or, perhaps conversely, the man will leave the woman), or the woman will deal as was sort of indoctrinated into certain kinds of women (especially those who wanted a finer life and upper class mobility), and may have to go back and forth on whether to have any independence or to be a figurative door mat for the husband to step on.

The emphasis in Martha, which was apparently a made-for-TV movie that Fassbinder happened to squeeze out in the same year of his crushingly sad (and great) Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, is on, like in many of his films, the woman and how she has to somehow simply survive in the world of men and her circumstances. There may even be a slice of Bunuel here too, which I may be inferring with my critic hat on, as it's about this kind of perverse push-and-pull between this couple - Martha meets Helmut (frequent Fassbinder collaborator and muse during this melodrama period of films Margit Carstensen and Karlheinz Böhm respectively) after what is the first of many quasi- absurdly sad moments where her father dies of a heart attack on some steps in Rome - and how there's a slightly sado-masochistic side of things where it shouldn't make sense how she can stand him treating her... and yet, she does, and there's a perversely satirical edge to everything.

One should remember that Fassbinder during this time was submerged in Sirk influence too, though I don't know if I detected that so much, aside from some of the heightened melodramatic touches (and the ending, which is really TOO much, but hey, we're already there, why not). There's this underlying subtext to this all that made me think about rich, domineering men *and* the women who become subservient to them. Bohm, also from a few Fassbinder films as well as Peeping Tom, has the face of a man who may be a sadist, but in his mind does he think he's being *fair*? He has the attitude and demeanor of someone who probably would've been right at home in the Nazi party - not that his character espouses racist language so much - it's all in the demeanor and how he treats his wife. A key aspect though is we don't really see what he's like outside of Martha's purview: does he cheat on her (probably), does he act like this when he's off on his, uh, engineering gigs that he forces down Martha's throat (so he can, you know, talk with her about things that interest him), and what about that sexual appetite?

The moments where Helmut has his 'way' with Martha is telling, and it's the moments of the film (aside from when Martha really gets hysterical, per the hysteria of the script itself) where there's that Bunuelian sense of... oh, you rich folk, you're so wacky- depraved (and also, as part of the satire, lacking any compassion or soul). He is basically raping Martha to an extent - there's one scene where he kind of makes Martha sit out in the sun so she can 'tan', but her pale skin burns, she lies out naked, and he forces himself on her anyway. And what about Martha? Has she become traumatized by all of this behavior? The gas-lighting part shouldn't be overlooked, though that's only an element of the behavior he puts on her; when I mention 'Fifty Shades', obviously it's not as much a comparison in quality (this is Fassbinder in 1974 for godsakes AND Michael Ballhaus on camera) or in awareness. If 50 Shades knew what images it was really portraying and understood the pitch-black, barely traceable and might as well be a cold heartless drama worldview, it would look like Martha.

Oh, and Margrit Carstensen: like some of her work (though not all) for this filmmaker, at times she has a face where there's much more being said in the eyes, tension and fear and confusion and obedience and something that the character may be mistaking for love (or those few bits where it may be clear her father's death f***ed her up more than she's ever dealt with, not to mention her mother and her issues). What's remarkable is that Fassbinder, per the style he's going for which has some cold detachment and a provocation of the audience often to feel for the characters despite the coldness of the tone, still leaves room for Carstensen to make this woman all her own, and that she can find the unfolding tragedy (or tragedies) as each moment of this disaster of a marriage unfolds.

The story takes a little time to get going really - that scene at the amusement park on the roller coaster is what hooked me in - but once it does, Martha reveals itself as one of the sickest "comedies" about marriage ever made.

Good, nearly great Fassbinder about an adult woman who passes from the care of her controlling parents to the even tighter control of a bizarre husband. Margit Carstensen plays the woman and Karlheinz Böhm (whom you probably remember as the protagonist of Michael Powell's Peeping Tom) the husband. This is one of Fassbinder's better films. Jonathan Rosenbaum, who doesn't seem to be much of a Fassbinder enthusiast, cites it as his very favorite. It would rank as one of my favorites, too, but for a couple of reasons. It kind of makes its point fairly early on, especially after the marriage takes place. Then it gets a tad repetitive, and goes on for nearly two hours. The next year, Fassbinder made an even better film dealing with similar themes called Fear of Fear, which also starred Margit Carstensen. Carstensen's performance is exceptional in Martha (and just as good in Fear of Fear), and Böhm is quite good, too.