Fontane - Effi Briest (1974)
Directed by Rainer Werner Fassbinder

Film Review

At almost the exact midpoint of his short but highly productive filmmaking career, Rainer Werner Fassbinder delivered what is arguably his finest and most personal film, one that would be among his biggest critical successes. Fontane - Effi Briest was also a film that marked a turning point in Fassbinder's career, showing a departure from the fairly modest, often experimental pieces of the past to the lavish, more mainstream-oriented productions of the future, which would culminate in his monumental 14 part television series Berlin Alexanderplatz (1980).  So affected was he by Theodor  Fontane's 19th Century novel Effi Briest that Fassbinder had intended to adapt it as his debut feature.  Wisely he waited until he had mastered his craft and secured his reputation as the standard bearer of New German cinema.  Fassbinder's Effi Briest is one of cinema's most exquisitely crafted and poignant literary adaptations.

It is here that Fassbinder shows most clearly the great influences from which he fashioned his own brand of filmmaking.  The presence of the legendary playwright Bertolt Brecht is felt in virtually every shot and if you want to know precisely what is meant by that oft-repeated phrase Brechtian distancing you have only to watch this film.  The artificiality, almost staginess, that comes from the director's appropriation of this device has an acute, almost vicious, sense of irony that is so appropriate for the film.  This, along with Jürgen Jürges's haunting black-and-white photography, emphasises the harsh falseness of the world in which the heroine lives, a world in which one is compelled to suppress one's own feelings and live according to a plethora of unwritten dictats.  The sense of repression that Fassbinder conveys in this film is palpable, almost suffocating.

The other significant influence in Fassbinder's oeuvre was Douglas Sirk, a German-born filmmaker who is best known for the colourful melodramas that he made in Hollywood in the 1950s.  Sirkian motifs constantly recur in Fassbinder's films and Sirk, like Fassbinder, exploited the popular melodrama form to expose the failings of contemporary society.   In Fontane - Effi Briest, Fassbinder employs many of the techniques that Sirk used to great effect in All That Heaven Allows (1955).  Effi's repression and growing sense of isolation from the world around her are accentuated through repeated use of mirrors, window frames and tree branches to contain her in a tight physical and emotional space.  She is a prisoner, enmeshed in a web of fear and lies, incapable of living a fulfilled life, destined to be crushed like someone dying from asphyxia.  Etiquette demands that she surrender her individuality and live as society expects her to, and so she becomes but a shallow reflection of herself, trapped within the confines of a frame, like a picture on the wall of a dead mausoleum.  It is not hard to see other influences, particularly Jean-Luc Godard (possibly the cinema's greatest adherent to Brechtian technique) and Ingmar Bergman (you can hardly avoid noticing the references to The Seventh Seal and Cries and Whispers).

Rainer Fassbinder was not only a consummate technician, a great cinematic artist with an unerring knack of investing a shot with immediate visceral impact and layers and layers of meaning, but he was able to get the best out of his performers.  This can be seen most readily in this film through Hanna Schygulla's extraordinary portrayal of the title character.  The austerity of the mise-en-scène is matched by Schygulla's remarkably controlled performance, which reveals so much beneath the surface that it is heart-breaking to watch her character's slow disintegration under the weight of oppression outside her and the burgeoning guilt within. 

Schygulla had worked with Fassbinder on a number of films prior to this but their relationship was, to say the least, far from cosy.  It was during the making of Fontane - Effi Briest that they had their most heated falling out.  At one point Fassbinder was so fed up with his muse's carping over how to play her part that he screamed at her "I can't stand the sight of your face any more. You bust my balls!"  They would not work together for four years after this film, their next collaboration being Die Ehe der Maria Braun (1979).  The tempestuous nature of Fassbinder's relationship with Schygulla makes it all the more remarkable that together they should both consistently deliver their best work.  Perhaps conflict is the best engine for creative endeavour...

Film Synopsis

In 1890, Effi Briest, the seventeen-year-old daughter of well-to-do parents from a provincial town outside Berlin, is courted by the wealthy Baron von Instetten.  Although he is twenty years her senior, Effi consents to marry the baron.  Naturally, her ambitious mother approves of the match.  But there is no love in the union and, through boredom, Effi begins a love affair with another man of her own age, Major Crampas.  The affair soon burns itself out and Effi accompanies her husband to Berlin, where he hopes to become a minister.  Some time later, Instetten discovers the love letters that Crampas wrote to his wife and sees only one course of action to save his honour and preserve his place in society.  He challenges his rival to a duel even though Effi has long ceased to love him.  Effi's woes do not end with Crampas's death.  Convinced that he has been dishonoured and betrayed by his wife's conduct, the baron drives Effi away from him.  The worst part of the enforced separation is that Effi will lose not only contact with her daughter, but also her love...