LE MARIAGE DE MARIA BRAUN ***

4sur5 The Marriage of Maria Braun is generally considered the most famous game in the work of Fassbinder, this film is especially offered to the international recognition to Hanna Schygulla, actress-director of the fetish (they began their career together, circa 1969 ). Acid comedy, social chronicle both ultra-realistic, high-in-color, The Marriage confuses the image of her heroine with that of resurgent Germany in the reconstruction of the 50s almost compulsively.

This is the first portrait of a country choosing to extract rolled chaos and to erase the ruins by the headlong rush. Headlong scattered but cropped, channeled through the national conformity or social aggression. There is thus a common line behind which each surrenders in a complacency that leaves no room for sentiment, the risk or pain. The malaise of the Company is palpable, but the shared trauma prompts discipline rather than effusions, the festivities or reconciliation.

Maria Braun ostensibly permeates the mood and aspirations of the Germans in the postwar period, showing that at every level and in every place in society, it is not to assume the past but to live despite it. It is a consensual form of totalitarianism, of tacit and dispassionate between all Germans. Happiness is impossible but its substitutes available: Maria Braun simulates life, allows himself to success rather than fooling anyone and especially not itself, rooted in its borrowed existence.

Early in the film, Maria Braun is a strict woman, full of principles (grotesque obstinacy of the first sequence) and never missing an opportunity to bow to the rules, while at the same time has all the features of the femme fatale, the plague of self-centered. His life is full of codes and references very conservative or rigid (hated vulgarity, allegiance to the stronger sex), which allows it to easily adapt to the training of instincts in force in the Company. Self-consumerism is outweighed by the social ambition (his character is complemented by a few self-taught social sacrifices cynical), but the balance achieved is deleterious. At the end of its stroke, Maria Braun, putting his face no horizon and a clear perspective, is sealed by the return of a past of violence and frustration fueled the courage to exist. The fight, the way was more stimulating than this new ataraxia, since peace and comfort are hampered by the loose laid truths of memories: the remains are rude, have no need of pretense that can betray the dark or vacuum of a ghost and this inhibited.

Fassbinder was one of the first to describe this period and make the novel (Maria Braun prominently in the "New German Cinema" which Fassbinder is a figurehead). It reflects perfectly the existential German climate, his affection for the established order, the sense of duty, of righteousness: all is forgiven as the consistency and continuity remain. Germany amnesiac 50s looks like a decadent under control, as she hides behind a blind progress, a subtle order and colorful.

The initiative of Maria Braun, comment on the paradoxes of the German bourgeoisie, is extended by two other films on the FRG, orchestrated around two women: Lola (1981) and Veronika Voss (1982) - it's still not counting Lili Marleen, shot in the same period as the trilogy.

Overall Rating 77

Synopsis: Maria and Herman saw a fleeting happiness during the war. Maria, became coach, clings to the thought of being loved. When he reappears, she kills her lover and Herman confesses to the murder.

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