too vast a subject
by Douglas Messerli
Rainer Werner Fassbinder (screenwriter,
based on a novel by Theodor Fontane, and director) Fontane Effi Briest, order Viele, die eine Ahnung haben von ihren
Möglichkeiten und Bedürfnissen und dennoch das herrschende System in ihrem Kopf
akzeptieren durch ihre Taten und es somit festigen und durchaus bestätigen (Effi Briest) / 1974, USA 1977
Some
critics have criticized Effi Briest
as being too cold and calculated in its method and tone, and there is little
doubt that Fassbinder, unlike in so many of his other works (for example the
film of the same year, the emotionally-charged Fox and His Friends), does purposely take an objective viewpoint,
allowing each of his central figures to reveal their own strengths and
failings. But that does not mean that the director of this fascinating film is
“uninvolved.” Not only does Fassbinder tell much of Fontane’s story, verbally
interlinking the visual scenes, but, at times, even speaks in Effi’s voice. The
vast subtitle, also a creation of the director’s, is an outright statement of
how Fassbinder has read the novel, perceiving it as a work that reveals “Many who
have a notion of their potential and needs, and who nevertheless in their heads
accept the ruling system and thereby consolidate and downright confirm it.” The
ruling system of this film is the horrifyingly rigid Prussian society of the
Bismarck era, the world that ultimately brought about World War I and, in turn,
generated the later Nazi thinking that would result in the holocaust and World
War II.
While it is true that Fassbinder purposefully delimits any sexual and
most emotionally-leaden scenes, describing them only through the narrator’s
voice or having them occur off screen, that does mean that Effi Briest is without intense feelings one can experience in
nearly every frame.
First of all, there is the very beauty and innocence of its young
heroine, Effi (the remarkable Hanna Schygulla), a truly naïve woman right out
of a Fragonard painting, swinging her way to the sun and stars. A true product
of her fiercely bourgeois parents, her doting father (Herbert Steinmetz) and
mother (Fassbinder’s own mother, Lilo Pempeit), the spoiled Effi is without
moral principle but, particularly like her mother, clearly still has ambitions,
as she herself admits. Although she does not even know the man, Baron Geert von
Instetten (Wolfgang Schenck)—whom we observe voyeuristically watching her early
in the film—who asks for her hand, she is perfectly willing to marry this much
older, not very handsome, but politically rising figure. She may fear that he
is a bit too principled, but she ignorantly has no worries whatsoever about
being taken out of the gentle community of her childhood to an isolated Baltic
town, where even Instetten admits there are very few intellectuals or people of
high taste.
The one woman Effi meets who is both beautiful and able to sing quite
lovely songs, she is warned against. Even motherhood is denied her, the nanny
doing almost all the work having to do with her new baby’s care, allowing Effi
only, from time to time, to take up the child as she would a doll. Fassbinder’s
presentation of this event is painfully stunning, after which the child’s
caretaker, Roswitha, takes back the child, swaddling it as if, in its mother’s
hands, it had been in danger.
Is it any wonder that, mostly out of boredom and the failure of her
husband to demonstrate any love, Effi takes up with the witty, unhappily
married rake, Major Crampas (Ulli Lommel)? If the affair also occurs only
off-camera, it is, in part, because it hardly matters. But we do recognize her
emotional delight in the simple, if momentary, freedom it allows her as each
day she walks to and picnics at the beach. If this is sex without love, we have
already been presented, quite emotionally, what does matter in this house: the
imprisonment, bodily and intellectually, of its young mistress.
Her husband’s appointment to a Berlin ministry is the only thing that
temporarily saves Effi, as she is sent off to rent an apartment, she herself
determining never to come back. Like hundreds of women of the era, the young
woman counterfeits rheumatism and other such maladies in order to remain
bed-bound until her husband can join her in the capital. Yet, in behaving like
so many others, Effi, has in fact, doomed herself to her inevitable fate. It is
clear that Insetten cannot show love and that does not love him, but by
remaining in such a relationship, she confirms the ethics
Had Effi found love in Crampas’ arms she might have, at least, been able
to break with the values of the world to which she is bound; without even that,
she is allowed nothing. When discovering her stupidly-preserved mementoes of
that six-year-old “romance,” Insetten ridiculously feels he has no choice but
to fight a duel with Crampas, a dilemma as outrageous as that described in
Schnitzler’s Lieutenant Gustl,
published five years later. But whereas Gustl discovers, fortunately, that his
would-be opponent has died during the night, Insetten must go through with the
duel, killing his former friend and divorcing his wife. The child remains with
him, and the woman he once proclaimed to love must face life alone in a
boarding house. Even her parents, in
their conventionality and their fears for neighborhood gossip, refuse to take
her in.
Despite what we now perceive as the inner horrors of the outwardly
ordered world wherein Effi is entrapped, she refuses or is simply unable to
rise up and reject its values. She, now an outsider to society, perceives
herself as just that, as one unworthy of any other treatment. It is now clear
just how her own parents have conspired to keep her ignorant of any
comprehension that might have saved her. Twice in this film, the father utters
the cliché that to discuss such an issue is “too vast a subject.” The first
time it is as he speaks with Effi, attempting, we presume, to talk about love.
We might simply perceive that as a problem many parents face of being unable to
talk forthrightly to their children about sex. But even after, in her isolated
world Effi finally recognizes that her husband has turned her own daughter
against her, and falls ill—the parents finally indulging their beloved child by
allowing her to return home to die—Briest and his wife cannot admit to their
involvement in the series of events, cannot admit to themselves their own
guilt. Briest comments, once more, “It is too vast a subject,” refusing, in
short, to give the matter any deep thought.
If one still feels that this sad story is clinically presented, I
suggest that they also are not giving this amazing work the careful attention
it deserves. Like so many Germans throughout that next century (and, of course,
not only Germans, but people all over the world), Fassbinder suggests, refusing
to independently think or to teach others to do so is the greatest of all
crimes, issues which, more recently Austrian director Michael Haneke has
revisited in his The White Ribbon.
Los Angeles, July 13, 2013
Reprinted from International Cinema Review (July 2013).
No comments:
Post a Comment