Plot Details: This opinion reveals minor details about the movie's plot.

Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s 1974 film of “Fontane Effi Briest” illustrates the novel that has been called “the German Madame Bovary” (well, it is at least insofar as its about provincial boredom and adultery, but without Emma’s quest for romance from reading novels). Fassbinder himself read many excerpts from Theodor Fontane’s text onto the soundtrack. Presumably with malice and forethought (like Werner Herzog in Heart of Glass), Fassbinder broke the cardinal “Show, don’t tell rule,” rule. As a result, there is little to engage audience interest, and nothing to stimulate involvement with the characters going through their tragic moves onscreen.

The flat delivery of the lines, the undramatic often static compositions that are held for unusually long times (particularly in contrast to the nervous camera movement in other films of Fassbinder and of other German directors of the 1970s) risks anesthetizing viewers, though there is sharp,classic black-and-white cinematography (done by Jürgen Jürges and Dietrich Lohmann) that bring to mind films from further north than Prussia (that is, Ingmar Bergman’s).

The way that an immobile Hanna Schygulla is artily photographed recalls the more static later von Sternberg films in which the worship of Marlene Dietrich overpowers weak narrative drive. In addition to extended still-life closeups of Schygulla and distant, all-but-unchanging scenese of her parents sitting at a table discussing her, there are a lot of mirrors and many very stylized tableaux. Since Effi’s fear of ghosts is used by her husband to keep her off-balance and under control, the ghost images of mirror reflections does seem appropriate, I must admit.

Hanna Schygulla was over 30 when the film was shot and was totally unconvincing as a 17-year-old and 18-year-old tomboy Effi (the ages of the title character through 2/3rds of the film). Wolfgang Schenck looks old and ridigly honor-bound enough. (He had once been a suitor of Effi's mother.) He is thoroughly unsympathetic as the very correct patriarchal husband — not that Schyugulla is particularly sympathetic herself. He carries off his (belated by a generation) trophy to an isolated Baltic Sea town. Her seducer, Major Crampas (Ulli Lommel) is a cypher, not just his final request. The dialogue throughout is affectless. The actors might as well be under hynposis (as those in "Heart of Glass actually were).

Effi does finally get an exstended (spoken) aria near the end and Baron Geert practically has one in explaining the necessity of the duel. These are more than an hour and a half into the film (which lasts two and a quarter hours). Roswitha (Ursula Strätz) is the only character who emotes, and devotion to Effi is practically the only emotion she was allowed by Fassbinder.

The worshipful incantation (by Fassbinder himself) of Fontane’s words may work better in German, since “Effi Briest” is better known to those schooled in German classics than it is to Anglophones. Fassbinder himself purporedly remarked: "Well, it's a film that really only works in the German language." That's a warning I wish I had heeded. Moreover, the subtitling has been criticized by those better able than I am to compare what is said in German (in this move with a lot of talk, but also with silent-movie-like intertitles) with what is written in English. Moreover, some of the title flash by very rapidly.

“Effi Briest” is an impossible film to like and it's hard to admire it because the stylization is so extreme . Obviously, Fassbinder chose to illustrate a classic of German literature rather than to try to bring it to life. But why? To show that the society of Prussia in the 1880s was suffocating, particulary for women? Don't we already know that without being suffocated for watching his movie?

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For a more appreciative take on this film deliberately stripped down by Fassbinder see metalluk's review. He is to blame for my prepartion of a list of the best post-WWII German movies, a list on which this movie assuredly will not appear.




Recommended: No

Suitability For Children: Not suitable for Children of any age