BAAL - #914

Made for German television in 1970, Volker Schlöndorff’s adaptation of Bertolt Brecht’s Baal transports the 1918 play to (then) modern day, providing filmmaking wunderkind Rainer Werner Fassbinder with an impressive showcase for his acting skills, but ultimately failing in making the work feel vital to the times. In fact, Brecht’s widow was so unhappy with it, the family estate placed a ban on the release that was not lifted until four decades later.

Baal is the story of a larger-than-life personality--a bisexual, alcoholic poet--equal parts Byron, Kerouac, and Bukowski. Fassbinder plays the bard with a full-force gusto. Baal is besotted with drink and with his own self-worth, resorting to reciting his rhymes rather than engage with others, preferring squalor to success and society. Indeed, the film’s second scene--each individual sequences is announced by numbered title cards, lending a kind of nouvelle vague tenor to the whole montage--is probably its most interesting. Decked out in a suit and tie, Baal is being hosted by a rich benefactor willing to publish his poems. Surrounded by upper crust intellectuals, Baal tweaks their noses rather than get along. He drinks too much, stuffs his face, insults them, and openly hits on the rich man’s wife (Miriam Spoerri). It’s a bit like watching the charity banquet scene in Ruben Östlund’s The Square--an animal has been let loose in the soiree. Baal’s response to their objections? You shouldn’t have invited me in if you didn’t expect me to be myself.

Which pretty much sums up how Baal conducts himself throughout the story. Anyone who enters into his orbit should expect to be brought down by his gravitational pull. At first, this is compelling in the way that the behavior of scoundrels can often be; across subsequent scenes, Baal publicly humiliates the rich man’s wife, steals the girlfriend of a loyal friend, deflowers her, and then shames her into suicide. The dude is bad news. But as Baal progresses, and we watch the main character wander from bottle to bottle, shivving anyone who stands in between, he starts to be less interesting. To Fassbinder’s credit, he never hits a false note, and the hatred he engenders in the viewer is real, but he and Schlöndorff fail to give us any nuance to the character. His philosophy never shines nor sticks. Brecht appears to provide moments where we might get glimpses of an actual soul beneath the rough exterior, but the filmmakers don’t seize on them.

That said, Baal arrives with a surprising punk rock aesthetic that has less in common with either the French New Wave and Easy Rider Hollywood than it does with the anarchic back-half of the 1970s. From the opening scenes, when a leather-jacketed Baal strolls to the beat of a song celebrating his godlike status, there is a feeling that something gutsy is occurring. Cinematographer Dietrich Lohmann, who would work with Fassbinder on many of his own films like Love is Colder Than Death, has a gritty spontaneity to his shooting. His camera never feels locked down, and so Baal comes over as improvisational as the life of its subject. That keeps the movie interesting even when the screenplay lacks heft.

Side note, but when Baal and his cohort Ekart (Sigi Graue, The Merchant of Four Seasons) hit the road in the German backwoods, was anyone else reminded of David Gordon Green’s Prince Avalanche? Knowing Green’s tastes, it would not surprise me if Baal was somehow an influence.

This disc provided by the Criterion Collection for purposes of review.

FOX AND HIS FRIENDS - #851

In 1975, the writer/director Rainer Werner Fassbinder applied his finely honed sense of Sirkian melodrama to Fox and His Friends, a small story that encompasses class, ambition, and, at its root, a need to be loved. Fassbinder himself played the lovably dopey Fox, a one-time carnie whose continual insistence that he’d win the lottery finally comes true, cashing him in for 500,000 deutschmarks on the same day his boss and lover was sent to jail for tax evasion. Ironic, as one of the men gets money from the government, the other is busted for not putting his in.

That day, Fox also meets Max (Karlheinz Böhm, Peeping Tom), a wealthy antiques dealer. The two size each other up in at a public restroom in a silent scene full of secret gestures, meaningful looks, and a test or two. It’s masterfully choreographed, almost like something out of Bresson’s Pickpocket. Max has come along at just the right moment, introducing his new lover to a social group befitting his newfound riches. Max’s friends are disdainful at first, seeing their coupling as lewd and Fox himself as a rube. He also has a bit of a rough allure--a bad boy, if you will--so soon one of the men gives in to his lust. Eugen (Peter Chatel, The Merchant of Four Seasons) takes Fox home, and the former con man has no trouble seducing and dominating his conquest. It’s only after the fling becomes something serious that the dynamic changes.

Eugen’s family is going broke. Their bookbinding business is heading for bankruptcy, and the son sees only one way to bail his judgmental father out. He asks Fox to loan them some money, with promises of equity when the loan is paid off. As audience members, we see almost immediately that not all is as it seems with this plan, but poor trusting Fox, so eager to be accepted, and so afraid that Eugen will think he’s stupid, signs the deal without admitting he doesn’t truly understand it. It’s the final shift of power, the con man becomes the conned, making Eugen free to criticize and humiliate his lower-class boyfriend all he wants. His most insidious habit is how he corrects Fox’s etiquette. “If you’re looking for the dessert fork,” he begins, seeing Fox eating a pastry with his hands, and then ends by pointing out that it’s on the left of his plate. He couches his recriminations with a sharp dig, giving the pretense that he’s repeating something Fox already knows. Self-aware mansplaining. (It reminds me of Michael Sheen’s equally infuriating “um, actually” behavior toward Rachel McAdams in Midnight in Paris [review].)

Fox and His Friends is pleasantly simple, with big emotions but few dramatic sweeps to match. Fassbinder approaches everything gently, including his own performance. Rather than play Fox in broad strokes, he goes low-key. Fox is not very bright and surprisingly naïve, but not in a way that inspires laughter from the audience. Instead, as Eugen chips away at Fox’s swagger and reveals the kind-hearted simpleton underneath, we only gain more empathy for the well-meaning bumbler. We wish he’d do better, and would smack him upside the head if we could, but outside of some ostentatious purchases that bite him on the ass later, most of his financial loss comes from wanting to please his lover. His generosity is genuine, and also equal opportunity. One of their worst quarrels occurs when Eugen objects to Fox giving a loan to Klaus (Karl Scheydt, The American Soldier), his carnie boss, when he is released from jail. How hypocritical that Eugen’s anger is because he believes Fox will never see that money again. Fox trusts Klaus will pay him back, and regardless of that, you have to help your friends. Their other terrible fight comes in Morocco, when they look to pick up another man. It’s a strange and nuanced disagreement, hinging on a dual offense: Fox being hurt that he’s not enough, and also disgusted that Eugen doesn’t act with more authority in making it happen. You want this, so be a man and take it.

The only characters that the director goes big with are Fox’s belligerent, alcoholic sister (Christiane Maybach) and Fox’s friends at the gay bar, who come with their best “girl, please” sashay. Even more than 40 years later, Fassbinder’s depiction of the gay lifestyle still feels surprisingly fresh. That’s because rather than making Fox and Friends a movie about being homosexual, it’s just a movie with homosexuals in it. In fact, Fox and Friends is completely lacking in heterosexual expression. The only straight couple we see is Eugen’s parents, and they are past the demonstrative stage of their relationship.

But it’s not just the culture that Fassbinder treats matter of factly, it’s the whole of the film. He and cinematographer Michael Ballhaus (Broadcast News [review], The Last Temptation of Christ) don’t aim for the bright Technicolor of the 1950s pictures Fassbinder emulates; rather, they take a rather unadorned approach, something that brings to mind the Dardennes more than it does Sirk. It gives everything the feeling of real life, of actual existences observed. What happens to the characters never happens because of their sexuality, nor are they being punished for it when things go wrong. When LGBTQ advocates talk about representation in cinema and other entertainment, Fox and His Friends is just the kind of thing they mean: a movie where they just exist like anyone else. Fassbinder pointed the way forever ago, it’s time more started following his direction.

This disc was provided by the Criterion Collection for purposes of review.

THE BITTER TEARS OF PETRA VON KANT (Blu-ray) - #740

Casting back in my memory, I think I first heard of Rainer Werner Fassbinder at the same time I first heard of Douglas Sirk, back in the late 1990s or so when Martin Scorsese and others were trying to introduce Sirk back into the conversation. So, even though it would take me longer to actually experience the cinema of Fassbinder (I was drawn in by the stories I heard of Berlin Alexanderplatz [review]) than it would Sirk, whom I sought out immediately, the two would remain inextricably linked. Largely because Fassbinder wanted it to be so.

The German director’s 1972 film The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant is his tribute to Sirk, an attempt to adopt some of the same themes as the master of melodrama, to tell a story of women and their concerns, and to do so with the same colorful backdrops. While I’d suggest that the final result might be more aptly described as “Norma Desmond by way of Ingmar Bergman,” one can still see the sudsy fingerprints of Sirk all over it. Yet, it’s also more than homage: The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant is very much its own thing.

Fassbinder’s film is an adaptation of his own play, and the theatricality of the staging and structure of The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant would betray that even if the credits did not. (And, again, like the Sirk influence, this is a good thing). The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant is essentially a story in four acts, plus an epilogue, set in the same space, Petra’s apartment. Petra (Margit Carstensen, later seen in Fassbinder’s World on a Wire) is a middle-aged fashion designer who has sealed herself off in a claustrophobic world of her own creation. She still works, but mostly from bed, and as we watch, honestly, we only see her longsuffering, silent servant, Marlene (Fassbinder-regular Irm Hermann), actually put brush to paper and design anything.

Within her decadently decorated four walls, Petra receives many guests, including her cousin Sidonie and eventually Sidonie’s friend, Karin. (They are played, respectively, by Katrin Schaake and Hanna Schygulla, also regulars in Fassbinder films; in the way he builds a stock company of female actors, one might also draw comparisons with Pedro Almodovar.) It’s Karin who throws a spanner in the works. Petra is drawn to her, so in Act Two, she lures the younger woman back to her apartment, and in a case of “who’s playing who?” convinces her to stay with her after hearing Karin’s sob story about how tough her current living situation is.

Petra’s interest in Karin is more than charitable, and by Act Three, the fact that they are lovers is quite obvious, even if it’s not explicitly said so out loud. Yet, it’s also already over, the parasitic union having run its course for Karin, who has gotten what she wants. Leading to the final act, wherein Petra is despondent and suicidal on her birthday. Enter her college-aged daughter (Eva Mattes), whom she verbally abuses, and her aristocratic mother (Gisela Fackeldey), who clearly still rules the roost despite Petra’s many successes, and we see the pattern of three generations of broken women and their dysfunctional understandings of love. Petra lays everything bare, possibly making it clear for the first time for some of the more sheltered viewers in the early-’70s audience, and the melodrama reaches a crescendo.

Fassbinder divides all of these scenarios clearly, inserting a fade to black between and also marking the various sections with different songs, including hits by the Platters and the Walker Bros. Between those fades, he prefers long takes with invisible edits. There are cuts, there are angle changes, but they are never obvious. Once the drama has sucked you in, you’d be hard-pressed to notice or recall editor Thea Eymesz’s nips and tucks. Likewise, cinematographer Michael Ballhaus, who later went on to work with Scorsese and Coppola (not to mention Prince), uses the camera merely as a framing device. He doesn’t push, he doesn’t highlight--rather, his work is in capturing the drama, as well as color and the costuming. Petra as written and as Margit Carstensen plays her, is forceful enough a presence on her own to command the montage without any added help. Well, except for maybe costume designer Maja Lemcke. The woman’s moods are telegraphed by her outfits and wigs. When she is seducing Karin, she is like an exotic queen out of some mythological history, all baubles and distractions; when she is being jilted, she is more covered, and her hair is a hard-lined bob; on either end of the movie, when she is in despair, she wears a plain nightgown and no wig at all. The space between is so long, we forget her most honest face before we are reminded of it again at the end. Without the warpaint and the wardrobe, she is vulnerable. At her most naked, she is the most alone.

For technical specs and special features, see the full article at DVDTalk.com.

SIDELINE: MORE REVIEWS FOR 6/11

There was no post here on the blog last week, so I have fallen a bit behind again. As you'll see in the monthly round-up, it's not for lack of work; on the contrary, it's been too much work, I've been reviewing a lot. All I need to do is double up one week, though, and I'm back on track--and that should hopefully be easy, since I have four new releases (two Louis Malle, a Satyajit Ray, and the most recent Eclipse set) waiting to be watched. Comic Con is also coming, so you may see me scrambling yet again in not too long. Who all is going to the big show this year? Be sure to stop by Tr!ckster, there is much to be done and seen, including a Criterion sponsored event celebrating Kurosawa and raising money for relief in Japan. I'll also be part of Symposium 5, a ticketed event, so plan on going to that now!

IN THEATRES...

* 13 Assassins, samurai slaughter from Takashi Miike.

* Beginners, Mike Mills' exploration of mortality, love, and depression will catch you off guard. Naturally quirky and moving, it stars Ewan McGregor, Christopher Plummer, and Melanie Laurent.

* Green Lantern. You will believe that space can be realllllly boring. And Earth. And everything else.

* Larry Crowne. This weekend, you can watch cars transform into robots, or you can let Tom Hanks transform your cold, dead heart into something living again. Your call.

* Midnight in Paris, everything old is new again in Woody Allen's delightful return to form.

* Submarine, a quirky, heartfelt coming-of-age drama set in Wales.

* The Tree of Life, in which Terrence Malick wrestles with the universe, the All Father, and all fathers.

* The Trip, Steve Coogan on a very funny roadtrip with his pal Rob Brydon. Directed by Michael Winterbottom.

* X-Men: First Class: Hey, man, that's a groovy mutation, but the movie's kind of a piece of crap.

ON DVD/BD...

* BLAST!, a science documentary about sending a telescope up into the sky on a balloon to look at the stars.

* Carancho, an Argentinian twist on crime and romance, from the people who brought us Lion's Den.

* The Cocoanuts, yuck it up with Los Bros. Marx in their 1929 debut.

* Despair, a Vladimir Nabokov adaptation from writer Tom Stoppard and director Rainer Werner Fassbender, starring Dirk Bogarde. And it's as weird as that combination would suggest.

* Eight Iron Men, a WWII variation on the "chamber room drama" that never quite takes off. From Edward Dmytryk and Stanley Kramer.

* The Goddess, Paddy Chayefsky wrote this thinly veiled portrait of a Marilyn Monroe-type actress, played by Kim Stanley. Interesting, if not entirely successful.

* Laila, a silent Norwegian epic from 1929.

* Man from Del Rio, starring Antony Quinn as a Mexican sheriff in a racially progressive 1950s western.

* The Man in the Net, starring Alan Ladd, directed by Michael Curtiz. Read the review that one fan called "a classic example of...uninformed arrogance" and inspired him to suggest I "take up something else to while away your time or attend a junior college film class."

* Marriage Italian Style, a strangely dark, yet intriguing, romantic "comedy" from Vittorio De Sica, reteaming Sophia Loren and Marcello Mastroianni.

* Never Apologize, Malcolm McDowell's one-man show in remembrence of director Lindsay Anderson.

* New York, New York, Martin Scorsese's notorious 1977 musical mash-up of new and old styles, starring De Niro and Minnelli.

* Public Speaking, Martin Scorsese's documentary about author Fran Lebowitz. Engaging and funny.

* The Romantic Englishwoman, Joseph Losey directing a Tom Stoppard script about Glenda Jackson's aching loins. And Michael Caine yells a lot.

* The Sacrifice, a beautifully remastered new edition of Andrei Tarkovsky's final film.

* Spectacle: Elvis Costello with...Season 2, a second go-around with the maestro.

* Vera Cruz, Burt Lancaster and Gary Cooper shoot up Mexico in a film by Robert Aldrich.

* Who Took the Bomp? Le Tigre on Tour, a concert documentary about the influential feminist punk band. The DVD includes a ton of great bonus features.

* Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow, a trio of themed stories from director Vittorio De Sica and actors Marcello Mastroianni and Sophia Loren.

ALI: FEAR EATS THE SOUL - #198

I've been meaning to watch Ali: Fear Eats the Soul since I reviewed Magnificent Obsession last month. Rainer Werner Fassbinder was probably Douglas Sirk's most fervent and notorious student, and Ali one of the films where the German director distilled Sirk's melodrama into a more modern European landscape.

Emmi (Brigitte Mira) merely wanted to get in out of the rain when she ducked into the Asphalt Bar, but she got much more then she bargained for. Taunted by a snotty woman whose advances he had rejected, Ali (El Hedi Ben Salem) asks Emmi to dance. The fifty-something cleaning lady obliges, and a love affair begins. The Asphalt is a hangout for Arab immigrants, and it's a completely different world than the one that Emmi takes Ali back to when he walks her to her apartment. Yet, he stays overnight and never leaves. The two eventually get married, a union that brings them as much grief as it does happiness. 1970s Germany, like many places, was not a place where interracial marriages were common, and with twenty years or more separating Emmi and Ali, it's like one taboo has been grafted onto another to make a whole new taboo entirely.

The plot takes the familiar Sirkian dilemma and twists it in a new direction. Changing social mores allowed Fassbinder to get away with a political and emotional scenario the Hollywood codes of the 1950s would never have let Sirk deal with. It's a trick director Todd Haynes, who recorded a video introduction for this DVD, would borrow thirty years later for Far From Heaven, seeing Fassbinder's racial bet and raising him with some added homosexuality. In a Sirk film, the split would either be along age or class lines, the closest plot being Jane Wyman's rich widow chasing the nature-loving Rock Hudson in All that Heaven Allows. Fassbinder even tips his hat to Heaven's oft-mentioned metaphor of a television serving as a mother's replacement for the company of her children. In Sirk's film, the kids give their mom the TV as a gift; in Ali, one of Emmi's sons (Peter Gauhe) kicks out the tube on her set when he discovers mom has married a black man. She can't replace his replacement with something he doesn't approve of.

It is possible for an homage to be too much of an homage, and Fassbinder veers dangerously close to that edge. The plot of Ali: Fear East the Soul is wafer thin, and at times the writer/director piles on the heavy emotions to the point of overload. While the fantastic color scheme of the movie, utilizing solid blocks of garish color to suggest the characters are trying to dress life up in a happiness they don't really possess, calls to mind Sirk's 1950s pastels, other fumblings with the Sirk toolbox have the faint odor of postmodern irony, as if Fassbinder is slightly above the concerns he chronicles. The gossipy hens who live in Emmi's building, for instance, seem plucked right out of an old television show, and Fassbinder's own turn as the lazy German husband who hates the Turks and Arabs stealing his job just needs a beer stain on its wife-beater T-shirt to make the caricature complete. Fassbinder is just one of the many stiff actors to appear in Ali. The mechanical step-turn-look blocking is more like a Bresson-directed non-performance than the quiet operatics Sirk peddled in.

I guess I can't really say I know what 1970s Germany was actually like, but much of the racism struck me as overwrought and even a tad cartoony. Emmi is ostracized, given the most scowly dirty scowls, and her friends are more than open with their polemics and urban legends about the habits of black men. Yet, race also provides some of the more interesting elements of the larger story. Emmi herself is rather cavalier about mentioning having belonged to the Nazi party or taking Ali to one of Hitler's favorite restaurants for dinner after their marriage ceremony. She carries within herself an underlying racism that Fassbinder saw in Germany, a hypocrisy of a supposedly enlightened present that has not really eradicated the sins of the past, just repositioned them. Emmi has never had to confront her own feelings about race, and loneliness is not a convenient enough excuse to fully erase deeper prejudice.

The movie actually improves in its third act when Emmi's friends, family, and neighbors adjust to her new husband. Now that Emmi doesn't have to deal with their scorn, she begins to objectify Ali and show him off. There was always a kind of motherly element to their relationship that sometimes garners some unintentional laughs, as if Fassbinder had accidentally spliced a little Harold and Maude into his workprint. Even so, the early part of the movie is at its best when it's just the quiet moments between the pair, the initial courtship and the dinners at home. Something real passes between the actors, and thus it is sad when the newlyweds are separated. Emmi mothering Ali in private is one thing, but putting him to work in a neighbor's storage shed or letting her co-workers feel his muscles emasculates him. It puts the man in a dark humor. He demands that Emmi make him couscous, and when she refuses, he returns to the buxom blonde bartender (Barbara Valentin) who made him couscous before he met Emmi. The food becomes the symbol of something he is lacking.

The phrase "fear eats the soul" is a Moroccan saying that Ali teaches Emmi, and it describes the overall problem the two face. They let the worries of the outside world distract them from the interior and private life that nourishes them. Fassbinder also plays it a little on the nose by giving Ali a physical ailment that is literally eating away at his insides, but that seems more shoehorned in for an enhanced dramatic finale than an embedded part of the movie. It does, however, allow him to make it just about Ali and Emmi again, which is where the film should end up anyway. In spite of this, in his last distortion of the Sirk approach, Fassbinder unleashes a cynicism that is inherent in his work and is probably the source for some of those writing problems I complained about earlier. Rather than a great romantic surge to close out the picture, Fassbinder sticks to something more bittersweet. The lovers may be reunited, but the problems that divided them are incurable and cyclical. The fear can never be fully done away with, and it's always hungry.

Rainer Werner Fassbinder may be in love with the great romantic artistry of Douglas Sirk, but that doesn't mean love is something he can believe in himself. I guess that's the difference between wanting to be Douglas Sirk and actually being him.

BERLIN ALEXANDERPLATZ - #411

In the documentary Z Channel: A Magnificent Obsession, which in some ways serves as a kind of alternative text book for adventurous cinephiles looking for a resource for finding important lost films, a commentator describes Berlin Alexanderplatz as a large meal. It's hard to come up with something better than that. Rainer Werner Fassbinder's 15-plus hour epic is a lot to digest, a banquet of a movie that one begins devouring when the hours are young and is not done feasting upon until the day grows short.

Originally shown on German television in 1980 in fourteen parts (thirteen main chapters of about an hour each and a somewhat disjointed, two-hour epilogue), this sprawling adaptation of the 1929 novel by Alfred Döblin is a long-unseen curio of cinema history. Outside of its airing on the Z Channel and I believe some outings on public television, it hasn't been shown much in the United States except for a few theatres that programmed it as an event lasting several nights. A video store near me has a bootleg copy on VHS, but apparently only two customers have ever completed the entire thing--which is likely due to the quality of the bootleg more than it is the quality of the project.

Because make no mistake, Berlin Alexanderplatz is a fierce triumph. By the end of the first DVD (Criterion has put the entire show on six discs, with a seventh for supplements) and the first two episodes, after approximately two-and-a-half hours of the feast, I had consumed more than offered in most single-serving movies, and yet I was only just getting started. I was eager to sample the next course.

The story opens in the mid-1920s. Franz Biberkopf (Günter Lamprecht), a WWI veteran and former pimp, is being releases from prison after serving a four-year sentence for accidentally murdering his prostitute girlfriend in a fit of rage. He's a portly, imposing figure, yet life beyond the prison gates appears loud and scary compared to the isolation of his sentence. Though the guard tries to comfort him and tell him that it hasn't been so long, that the world is ready to accept another lost soul like him, this reassurance hides a dark portent: he says that times are bad for everyone. Things aren't going to be as easy as Franz might hope, the world hasn't sat still waiting for him. (As if that wasn't enough of a warning, Fassbinder titles his first chapter "The Punishment Begins." Thank goodness that's not a warning for the viewer, as well!)

There are going to be many strange waters for Franz to navigate, not the least of which is troubles within his own soul. He is paranoid about how regular citizens perceive him, an anxiety only reinforced by the strict rules he must follow as a convict. He's also developed a touch of obsessive-compulsive disorder and gets caught on certain phrases, repeating them an undetermined amount of times before he can finally move on.

This makes Franz a man ripe to be exploited by the social turmoil that is about to erupt in Germany. Though he may wish to live a normal life on the straight and narrow, earning a living and loving his new girlfriend, Lina (Eisabeth Trissenaar)--herself an unbalanced, mercurial creature--there wouldn't be much of a narrative to be had if this were something easily achievable. In pretty short order, he finds that this is not as easy a task as it would seem, every conceivable job has either a personal pitfall or a political snag. Selling one particular newspaper, for instance, puts him in league with the Nazis and at odds with the Bolsheviks. Though he professes to have no real allegiance to any one movement, he has almost convulsive political outbursts that reveal there is more beneath the surface than he is letting show.

Really, Berlin Alexanderplatz could be subtitled "The Education of Franz Biberkopf." He is a scattered man, easily influenced by others. His ever-changing station is subject to whatever theory he has most recently concocted about the human animal and that unpredictable animal's disproving of said theory. His first instinct is to put his trust in the honor of others and the right of the individual to forge his own way, but a personal betrayal shakes his belief in the fundamental goodness of man. This leads to a semi-religious exile and one of the early highlights of Berlin Alexanderplatz. Episode 4, "A Handful of People in the Depths of Silence," has parallels to Jesus' final temptations during his fast in the desert and the trials of Job. Franz has to push through his cynicism and restore his faith in order to pull himself out of this particular pit of despair. If only he had it as easy as Job, though, because the tests Franz will face are far from over.

His new philosophy when he returns to Berlin proper is that people are strange, and one can only shrug at the strange things they do. He becomes a newspaper seller again, sticking to his commitment to be a good man. His big problem, though, is that the bar that serves as his second home and the friends he keeps are still part of the criminal underworld he has sworn to leave behind. This makes it hard for Franz to stay out of trouble. He has a dream at the start of Episode 6 where he is an innocent sparrow and one of his newest friends, Reinhold (Gottfried John), is a snake that lashes out and bites him when he least expects it. More fitting would have been a dream about Reinhold as a weasel, since John looks like one of the rodents out of Disney's Wind in the Willows. The actor creates one of the slimiest, most scummy screen villains to ever cross in front of the camera. Stuttering through his oily speeches, his stammer keeping time with his twitchy eyebrow, his face always betrays the false sincerity of his voice.

Reinhold starts up a particularly despicable pattern with Franz. Every time that the snake gets tired of his latest girlfriend, he passes it to the bird, and the bird passes the previous girl on to someone else, just like the pair of galoshes and other articles of clothing Reinhold uses as his pretense for sending the ladies to Franz's apartment. Women are an inconstant in Franz's life. Only one ever sticks around for long, his original prostitute, the woman he ditched when he took up with the one he ended up killing all those years ago. Eva (Hanna Schygulla) has a new pimp, but her devotion is to her first, to Franz. She appears at regular intervals, a rescuing angel.

Another constant is Franz's old cohort in crime, the always ready and capable Meck (Franz Buchrieser). Meck is the guy you can count on in any situation, who always has the angle, but he can't understand why Franz makes it so hard on himself. He and Reinhold both try to get Franz to rejoin the criminal element. They are in a gang run by Pums (Ivan Desny), a syndicate boss masquerading as a businessman. Pums would be more than happy to have Franz in the gang, and when the guys run a con on Franz, tricking him into betraying his own oath, Franz is forced to change his view of humanity once again.

The life-altering heist in Episode 6, "Love Has Its Price," causes changes in Franz that he won't be able to forget easily. As he emerges from his convalescence in Episode 7, he realizes that what all of these betrayals keep telling him is that he must stand alone, and if the straight-and-narrow is not truly open to him, he will dip his toe back into the darkside. He starts fencing for a newer, slicker operator, a shiftless dandy named Willy (Fritz Schediwy) and lets Eva send him a new girl, a young thing whom he playfully dubs Mieze (Barbara Sukowa). By concerning himself only with what he needs and letting the outside world drift--he even puts his friendship with Meck to rest--Franz finds a new contentedness. It is perhaps best exemplified by the alleyway he passes through daily, a carnal side street where perverts can chase their sickest desires in a carnival atmosphere. Franz listens to the barker's well-practiced sales pitch, ripped straight out of the Book of Revelations, and though he recognizes the artistry in it, he also knows that it's only a false front. Things are never as good as they seem, and knowing that keeps him from sliding into its vice-like grip (pun intended).

Ironically, though, this newfound contentedness is the beginning for the end for Franz. He surrenders his emotions to Mieze, and eventually starts letting others dictate what he should do, letting that self-sufficiency slide by the wayside with his oath to do good. They take his last remaining vices from him, leaving him only his thoughts. The past is always with him, shown to us in the oft-repeated scenes of the murder of Ida and images of life in prison. No matter how far forward he goes, these are his defining moments, and their constant presence makes the present a whole new kind of prison for Franz.

For Franz, it's a regression. If the first half of Berlin Alexanderplatz was his education, the second half is the man forgetting all that he learned. Once he stops searching for an answer to life's questions, he falls back into old habits, tumbling into his own history and its unavoidable repetition. His final trial is going to be to face himself, to answer for all he has done and, possibly worse, what he has allowed (and even enabled) to be done.

Fassbinder shot his movie like a conventional narrative. There are certain dreamlike qualities to it, such as the sparkle of light that bounces off of an actor's eye or their smiling teeth. Common lamps hang above the heads of people like guiding stars, and the air becomes alive with glitter and sparkle. There are also scenes where the performers freeze so the camera can get a 360-degree view of them or when the actors circle objects themselves, pacing the scenery as if this were a stage production. Yet, the bulk of the movie is gritty and real. You can almost feel the dust and the grime of city life between your fingers and smell the stale beer and sweat. Where Fassbinder indulges a more fanciful side is in keeping an omniscient eye that watches over the story, like an all-knowing author of a roving narrative. This first manifests as an outside speaker dryly informing us of the situation and happenings in the world tangential to what we are seeing. The director also allows his characters' interior monologues to be heard, coming out at times of distress or indecision. Sometimes more than one character's thoughts erupt at the same time, overlapping in a tango of panic and rushed emotion. This makes Berlin Alexanderplatz the cinematic equivalent of the kind of juicy European novel upon which it is based. Rather than being driven by one character or central circumstance, it embraces the full panoply of the human drama it portrays.

A notable tool at Fassbinder's command is the music of Peer Raben. The director and the composer lay music over the images carefully. In some of the early episodes, the score is spare and barely noticeable. In later episodes, it gets more elaborate and often runs uninterrupted through a scene. When Franz must confront one of his lovers, Cilly (Annemarie Düringer), not wanting to be underhanded with her when Reinhold is looking to trade partners again, Raben plays a repetitious, cascading line on piano, creating an inescapable tension in the scene that reinforces the connection between the two characters--a connection they cannot break as long as the music plays.

It's kind of funny what a gargantuan image Berlin Alexanderplatz has. People view it as a huge undertaking. Having now gone through the whole cycle over a course of a few nights, I don't think anyone should find it daunting. Perhaps the problem is in its regularly being cast as one large movie, which challenges our social conditioning that says a movie is supposed to be under a certain length. Yes, Berlin Alexanderplatz is one complete narrative, it is that scrumptious banquet I compared it to at the outset of this review. Yet, it is no larger in size than your average season of a complicated HBO series like The Sopranos or The Wire. Really, since Berlin Alexanderplatz was originally made for television, it is the prototype for the modern cable drama. Though the show is presented in individual, hour-long episodes that stand on their own as complete stories, they are also part of one overarching narrative. Each segment pushes the bigger story forward while still satisfying unto itself. (Other parallels to The Sopranos include Günter Lamprecht's physical resemblance to James Gandolfini and the extended dreamscape of the final episode, which is the one element of Berlin Alexanderplatz that challenges the mental endurance of the individual viewer.)

Just as with a gripping season of a TV series or an involving novel, Berlin Alexanderplatz is an addictive experience. Once you are in it, you don't want to stop going, and time passes as if it isn't even there. It's really a shame that this masterpiece, a crowning achievement of Rainer Werner Fassbinder's over-achieving career, has been out of circulation for so long. This new Criterion boxed set is another reason we are fortunate to be living in the age of DVD. Week after week, the new release slate puts more and more previously unattainable cinematic gems within our reach. It was thrilling to finally see Berlin Alexanderplatz, and having been satisfied by its particular flavors once, it's going to be a recipe I'll want to serve up again and again.

For technical specs and special features, read the full article at DVD Talk.