finishing what you start
by Douglas Messerli
Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Pea Frölich, and Peter
Märthesheimer (screenplay), Rainer Werner Fassbinder (director) Die
Sehnsucht der Veronika Voss (Veronika Voss) / 1982
The penultimate film of
Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Veronika Voss, is also, in my estimation,
one of his very best. Shot in lush black and white reminiscent of 1940
Hollywood productions, nearly every frame is stunningly beautiful in this heady
mix of suspense thriller, romance, tough film noir, and gangster movie that
engages its viewers at all levels. Part II of the loosely connected BRD Trilogy
(coming between The Marriage of Maria Braun and Lola)
this film is also highly political, revealing a postwar, 1955, Munich as a city
of figures caught in the past, attempting to blot out not only the present but
all consciousness. The former World War II movie star, Veronika (Rosel
Zeach)—unable after the war to regain her movie star status, and gradually
losing her beauty and, through the morphine to which she is addicted, her
mind—represents, clearly, Germany’s Nazi past, Veronika having been a protégé
of Goebbels. But that is only one side of the coin in a film that is filled
with doubles and mirror images. On the other side of war-time sufferers is an
old Jewish man who has survived the death camp Treblinka who uses the same
doctor as Veronika, Marianne Katz (Annemarie Duringer), to obtain morphine to obliterate
his memories.
Into
this city of the dead steps Robert Krohn (Hilmar Thate), a vital newspaper
sportswriter, who accidentally encounters Veronika after she has escaped from a
showing of one of her long-ago films (the double image occurs in this first
scene, as the film’s director, Fassbinder, is seen sitting beside the suffering
actress being shown a scene similar to that which will be played out later in
the film). Unable to bear the image of her younger self, she bolts, discovered
in tears by Robert in a nearby forest. A man of the “real” world, Robert does
not even recognize the aging beauty, but gallantly offers to accompany her
home, offering her his umbrella and arm for protection. A bit like Blanche
DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire, Veronika perceives him as a
kind of “gentleman stranger” offering her “a safe haven in a storm.”
Later, like Blanche in that earlier film, Veronika will time and again
ask for the lights to be dimmed so that the wrinkles and aging spots of her
face might go unnoticed, allowing her, as she admits, to seduce defenseless men
like Robert. Similarly, like Blanche, Veronika is a figure out of the past,
offering up her former mansion as well as her jewelry to her doctor in payment
for her “treatments.” Robert, we soon discover, is truly
defenseless, agreeing to meet with Veronika in a posh restaurant the very next
day, where she exhorts from him 500 marks so that she might buy a broach she
has spotted in the hotel lobby.
When they finish lunch, she returns to
the store to ask the clerk if she might return the jewelry for money;
fortunately, for her, the shop-owner (Lilo Pempeit, Fassbinder’s mother, who
appears in most of his films) recognizes the actress—and who, like Veronika,
calls up, with some fondness, the German war years—is only too ready to comply.
Accordingly, Veronika has tricked the innocent reporter out of cash she very
much needs for her addiction. In retribution, however, Dr. Katz later returns
the money to Robert.
Utterly
out of his element in this world of dreamers, Robert discovers himself being
strangely drawn to the mysterious woman, and is swept up into her horrific
world. Obviously, this world also parallels, as most critics have noted, the
one into which American actor William Holden, equally by accident, steps into
in Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard, where the equally delusional
Norma Desmond madly rules; like Norma, Veronica spends much of Fassbinder’s
movie trying to get back into filmmaking, finally convincing a director to cast
her in a couple of scenes of a new movie, which end, like Norma, in her mental
collapse.
These
allusions to other films, in fact, serve as further mirroring images, doublings
that Fassbinder uses at every level. I am sure Tony Rayns is correct when he
suggests that Fassbinder used a common “woman’s problem” genre, popular in the
German cinema of the 1930s. But the director also calls up—in the blindingly
bright all-white sanatorium, a kind of lit-up hell run by Dr. Katz, wherein
Veronika often finds herself entrapped—the Lewis Allen mystery/romance film of
1944 The Uninvited, wherein the characters all must also face past
ghosts (in this case quite literally) which threaten to tear apart their
current lives and kill one of them. In that film, as well, a psychiatrist, a
lesbian lover of the young heroine’s mother, imprisons the young girl with the
intent to kill her. Fassbinder makes clear in Veronika Voss that his
heroine’s involvement with her doctor is not merely her drug addiction, but
derives from her need to be loved; and that relationship is
revealed—particularly given scenes with the doctor’s assistant, Josefa—as a
lesbian one. Despite Robert’s later attempts to free her from the clinic in
order to help Veronika come to terms with the “real” world, the actress lies,
revealing her masochistic attachment to the self-destructive situation
After
observing Veronika’s breakdown and incidentally encountering her former
husband, screenwriter Max Rehbein (Armin Mueller-Stahl), Robert and he share a
few beers, resulting in what appears as far more than a male-bonding relationship,
Rehbein, in particular, almost caressing and holding the drunken Robert,
begging him not leave.
There are similar connections with numerous other films, even
including George Stevens’ 1942 Hepburn-Tracy “comedy,” Woman of the
Year, wherein an equally clueless sportswriter attempts to woo a
brilliantly strong-willed beauty and bring her into his reality, but ultimately
fails.
Many
critics, moreover, have observed the strange use of music by Peer Raben
throughout, mostly American songs which might have been heard on German radio
during those postwar days. These have generally been described as creating a
kind of irritating and disorienting feeling (much like the visual use of
Fassbinder’s lover Günther Kaufmann, an African-American GI, who speaks only in
English, who appears as a kind of minion to Dr. Katz’s evil empire—but, in
fact, is busy wrapping up extra drugs from the clinic for sale in the illegal
market outside). Certainly, the zither-like tunes, the intrusion of
country-western ballads, the heavy beating of a kettle drum—are irritating. But
they are also thematically important, creating yet more “mirror-like” allusions,
which enrich this already thickened film. The zither music, as Roger Ebert,
perceived, reminds one surely of The Third Man, another movie about
postwar Europe that involves evil intentions regarding drugs, and centers upon
the arrival in Austria of a kind of cowboy like character—a writer of westerns,
Holly Martin—who is equally unable to make sense of the world around him.
At
one moment I thought I heard remnants of the song that accompanied the trail by
Robert Mitchum in the 1955 film The Night of the Hunter, as he
attempts to track down the innocent children whom he intends to murder. Later,
I listened through the score again, but couldn’t precisely find that passage.
But I most certainly did hear bits from the Tennessee Ernie Ford classic
country-western song, “Sixteen Tons,” an appropriate choice for a story about a
woman indentured by her doctor:
You
load sixteen tones, what do you get
Another
day older and deeper in debt
Saint
Peter don’t you call me ‘cause I can’t go
I
owe my soul to the company store
In
short, just as Fassbinder uses the references to 1940s films, so too does he
use music, reiterating and mirroring the conceits of the picture.* These tunes
are not simply “irritating” background noise.
Finally,
like the ridiculously innocent Holly Martins of The Third Man,
Robert is a kind of American cowboy, not only defenseless, as Veronika puts it,
but, as he describes himself, a man who is determined to “finish what he
starts.” What he discovers in his amateur sleuthing, however, is something that
puts him completely out of these villains’ league: government and the evil Dr.
Katz are in collusion, the two of them torturing not only people on both sides
of the horror of the German war, but killing Robert’s girlfriend when she
attempts to frame the doctor. Unknowingly, the police support their acts. And
even Robert, at film’s end, finally refuses any further involvement. He has
been defeated, and, perhaps for the first time in his life, cannot complete
what he has begun.
When
the elderly Jewish couple commit suicide earlier, leaving their house and
antiques to Dr. Katz, it is inevitable, we perceive, that Veronika must follow
them in “closing the book.” Allowing her one last foray into an imaginary
past—this one calling up Josef von Sternberg’s The Blue Angel, Dr.
Katz locks her away in a small room, without morphine, but with a large stash
of sedatives. Veronika, awakening on Good Friday is desperate to relieve her
pain. Staring into a mirror, she carefully makes up her lips before swallowing
a bottle of the pills.
No
longer an innocent—Robert now knows the complete involvement of the head of
public health and the drug-dealing doctor—our would-be hero rejects any attempt
to “finish” his reporting duties, declaring, quite cynically, that
“journalistically speaking” it is not much of a story.
In
Veronika’s death scene, in retrospect, the film suddenly jumps out of its
several mirror-like frames into real life. For a few months later, Fassbinder
would replay the scene, overdosing—either accidently or intentionally—on drugs,
and, in that act, finally carrying his cross into Robert’s “real world.” **
*Fassbinder carries this
doubling to extremes in the scene with Robert and his drunken girlfriend as
they comment on the two “Walters,” she, evidently, uncomprehending the two
famous soccer-playing brothers, Fritz and Ottmar, were being both referred to by
their last names.
**Fassbinder’s last
film, Quarelle, unedited at the time of his death, most definitely
can be described as not of “a real world,” representing as it does a kind of
highly decoratively colorized hallucination of a gay paradise of
sado-masochistic masculine beauty. Certainly, it seems to me, it is something
not of this world, which, the characters in Veronika Voss, as much as they
which to escape it, are forced to face.
Los Angeles, August 15,
2013
Reprinted from Nth
Position (September 2013).
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