If Mother Küsters does go to heaven, it is in part just reward for what she endured after her husband of 30 years shot the personnel manager at the factory where he worked and then shot himself. Planned mass layoffs may have motivated the killing (offscreen) of the owner’s son.If there is anyone who knows why he did what he did , he or she is not in the film. (Motivation was not of much interest to Rainer Werner Fassbinder or to some other maker so the New German Cinema.)

Frau Küsters first hears of the shootings on the radio as she works on the kitchen table, assembling alarm clocks. Soon her house is crawling with reporters, because she is too polite to exclude them. The daughter-in-law who lives in the same apartment is determined to go ahead with a planned vacation to Finland. The son, who works in a refrigerated meat-packing plant is less than enthusiastic about going to the Arctic Circle for a vacation, but is totally dominated by his wife, who is about 6 months pregnant, and he meekly goes along abandoning his mother to her fresh grief and the scurrilous press (also see Volker Sclondörff's The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum on the trampling of privacy for "news" by German reporters)..

The other offspring is a daughter who, lacking talent, is making not very much of a singing career. She sees the notoriety from her father's shootings as a possible career boost and rushes home to capitalize on it. By the time the vacationers return from Finland, the daughter has moved in with a reporter/photographer who has published an article about the dead man full of what he knows are untruths. Mother Küsters feels betrayed, but continues her quest to clear her husband's reputation.

She is taken up (recruited) by a very suave and affluent pair of upper-class communists, the only persons other than her daughter (who is there to be photographed by the press) who attends the funeral. Mother Küsters makes a quite affecting speech at a meeting and is vigorously applauded. However, she soon grows frustrated that her new friends are only interested in her to exploit her and are more concerned about a coming election than about helping clear her husband's name. She is then used even more cynically by a radical fringe group that takes hostages at the paper where the daughter's now-boyfriend works. It must be that Fassbinder ran out of money, because the denouement is not filmed, but reported. Although the film was banned in (then West) Berlin, there must have been some place he could have filmed this.

Mother Küsters is played by the the plain and indomitable Briggite Mira (best known as the bewildered charwoman in Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, and who appeared in other Fassbinder films, as well). She reminds me of Philippe Noiret, who also looks like a basset hound. Totally without pretensions, not at all beautiful, she has a charisma as an obviously pure soul shines through the human muck around her. Thus, one particularly hates to see her mistreated. And pretty much everyone in the film (except her weak son) does mistreat her.

She is more sympathetic here than Fassbinder himself, who cast himself as a guleless working-class person used and discarded by some rich people who pretend friendship as they pursue other agendas unknown to the rough and naive title characterin "Fox and his friends," of . Though I dote on Mira, I'd have to say that "Fox" is a better and more interesting movie (as is "Ali", which may be Fassbinder's most accessible film).

The German title, Mutter Kusters Fahrt Zum Himmel," has been literally translated ".



Recommended:
Yes

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