Old Yorker

  • The Marriage of Maria Braun

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Die Ehe der Maria Braun

    Rainer Werner Fassbinder (1979)

    On the day that Theresa May ‘fired the Brexit starting gun’, BFI began their two-month Rainer Werner Fassbinder retrospective, with a screening of The Marriage of Maria Braun, followed by a Q&A with the film’s star, Hanna Schygulla, and Juliane Lorenz, Fassbinder’s assistant editor on the picture and currently President of the Rainer Werner Fassbinder Foundation.  The audience entered NFT1 to see an announcement on the screen of the treats in store.  The announcement referred to the film as ‘The Marriage of Maria Brown’.   If the perpetrator had been anyone else, you’d have suspected this was an unconscious expression of Europhobia:  we’re not having Germans tell us how to spell a fine old English name like Brown!  Since it was BFI, you could rest assured it was simple carelessness.  Fortunately, someone had spotted the embarrassing Anglicisation and the ‘Brown’ was corrected to ‘Braun’ by the time the text reappeared at the end of the film, when the BFI’s German guests took the stage.

    Although I didn’t stay for the whole Q&A, I wanted to see and applaud Hanna Schygulla, whose dazzling, charismatic performance in the title role sustains The Marriage of Maria Braun, and to hear a little of what she had to say.  The discussion with her and Juliane Lorenz was chaired by Erica Carter, professor of German at King’s College London, who asked Schygulla how conscious she’d been, while making the film, that it was a parable of Germany’s development during the decade following its defeat in World War II.  Schygulla downplayed any such awareness, recalling that she asked Fassbinder if it was really necessary for Maria to die at the end of the story.   My problem with Maria Braun was that I couldn’t see it as anything other than a political allegory.  This is a picture with a heroine self-aware enough to describe herself at one point as ‘the Mata Hari of the economic miracle’.

    The film begins in 1943, when Schygulla’s Maria marries Hermann Braun (Klaus Löwitsch) during an Allied bombing raid.  The newlyweds spend ‘half a day and a whole night’ together before Hermann goes back to the front.   At the end of the war, Maria is told that her husband is dead.  She takes a job as a hostess in a bar frequented by soldiers from the occupying US forces.  She begins an affair with Bill (George Byrd), an African-American officer, who’s much older than Maria and much crazier about her than she is about him.   She becomes pregnant by Bill.  Hermann returns from the dead – in fact, from a Soviet prison camp – to discover his wife and Bill undressing each other.  Intervening in the struggle between the two men that follows, Maria hits Bill on the head with a full bottle, killing him instantly, though unintentionally.  At a trial before a US military tribunal, Maria acknowledges her love for both Hermann and Bill, an admission that moves her husband to claim responsibility for Bill’s death.

    As Hermann begins a jail sentence, Maria, after an abortion, becomes personal assistant to – and the mistress of – a rich industrialist, Karl Oswald (Ivan Desny).  She reveals this to Hermann, insisting that it’s he whom she really loves and that their relationship can begin again once he’s out of prison.  Maria quickly rises to a powerful position within Oswald’s business empire and makes enough money to buy her own house.  In the meantime, Oswald visits Hermann in jail and promises to make him and Maria joint heirs to his fortune if Hermann agrees to desert Maria.  On his release, he emigrates to Canada, from where he sends his wife a red rose each month to remind her of his love.  After Oswald’s death, Hermann returns to West Germany and Maria.   With commentary on the 1954 World Cup final playing on the radio, the couple prepare to go to bed together.   Their lovemaking is interrupted by the arrival at Maria’s house of Oswald’s executor (Hark Bohm) and a notary public (Kristine De Loup), who have come to read the tycoon’s will.  Maria now discovers, to her distress, the pact that Hermann and Oswald made with each other.   She uses the stove to light a cigarette and is killed in a gas explosion:  it’s not explained exactly how this occurs or whether Maria’s death may have been suicide.   She dies as the final whistle blows in Berne:  West Germany have won the World Cup.

    That unexpected triumph – the Germans beat the ‘Mighty Magyars’ team from Hungary 3-2 – must have been a huge boost to national morale and Fassbinder uses this return from the international sporting wilderness to represent the sealing of Germany’s rehabilitation as a major political and economic power.  Maria Braun was Fassbinder’s biggest commercial success, in Germany and internationally.  It’s consistently entertaining and the opening and closing sections – the mix of horror and slapstick in the bomb-hit marriage ceremony, the dynamic irony of the World Cup commentary (which, assuming it’s the genuine article, has historical interest too) – are bravura pieces of film-making.  There are probably plenty of others in between for cinéastes able to pick up all the echoes in Maria Braun of the Hollywood melodramas that were close to Fassbinder’s heart.  The screenplay, by Peter Märthesheimer and Pea Fröhlich, is nothing if not coherent.  The dichotomy between Maria’s underlying, more or less unconsummated love for her German husband and her exploitative liaisons with representatives of America and big business is clearly designed to illustrate the economic over-development and spiritual under-development of West Germany during the early post-war years.  But Fassbinder’s stylised approach makes the meanings of the story, and of the mostly alienating people in it, too salient.  As a result, he seems to be making the same points repeatedly.

    It’s interesting to compare The Marriage of Maria Braun with the Depression-era Hollywood film Baby Face, directed by Alfred E Green, which describes the meteoric, unscrupulous self-advancement of its heroine Lilly Powers, played by Barbara Stanwyck.  Baby Face may be a much less sophisticated movie than Fassbinder’s yet I think it’s a better one in the sense that you’re immediately engaged by Lilly’s story but can see it too as offering larger insights into what drives a young woman of a particular time, place and social background towards money and independence.  In Maria Braun, the bigger political picture overshadows the individual story.  Fassbinder tends to favour actors whose appearance is striking-verging-on-grotesque and whose characterisations are hard-edged and one-dimensional:  Gisela Uhlen’s playing of Maria’s feckless mother epitomises this.  Although George Byrd is good enough as Bill, the German actors with cameos as American characters – Günther Kaufmann as another soldier, Bruce Low as a conference delegate – are terrible.  Apart from Hanna Schygulla, by far the best performance comes from Klaus Löwitsch as Hermann.  His quiet intensity and ambiguity make him relatively hard to read.  They also give Hermann Braun a quality of remoteness and mystery that’s a refreshing contrast to the prevailing style of this arresting but unlikeable film.

    29 March 2017

  • The Lost City of Z

    Old YorkerFilm review

     James Gray (2017)

    An article by the Canadian explorer John Hemming has just appeared on the Spectator website with the heading, ‘The Lost City of Z is a very long way from a true story – and I should know’.  The sub-heading reads:  ‘A new Hollywood film hypes Percy Fawcett as a great explorer.  In fact, he was a racist incompetent who achieved very little’.  The piece makes clear the liberties that James Gray’s film takes with the facts of Fawcett’s life, especially the details of his several expeditions to find an ancient lost Amazonian city, which Fawcett believed to have been inhabited by a civilisation exceptionally advanced for its time.  On the last of these expeditions, in 1925, Fawcett, by then approaching sixty, was accompanied by his elder son, Jack; both disappeared without trace.  John Hemming concludes that the fundamental problem is David Grann’s 2009 book The Lost City of Z, the primary source of James Gray’s script:  ‘… Grann hyped the story out of all proportion and wrongly depicted Fawcett as a great explorer  … Hollywood believed everything Grann wrote, and then hyped it up more’.   It’s amazing to a viewer like me who’d never heard of Percy Fawcett that what’s been put on screen is an artificially colourful treatment of its subject.  Gray’s picture seems conscientious and is formidably boring.

    Until 1906, when he first travelled to South America, Percy Fawcett was a career soldier and, according to the film, a somewhat thwarted one.  The opening scenes of The Lost City of Z – set in 1905 in Cork, where the protagonist is currently stationed – are mildly promising.  On a dynamically-filmed deer hunt, it’s Major Fawcett (Charlie Hunnam) who shoots and kills the quarry yet he’s virtually shunned at the hunt ball that takes place that evening.  When one elderly chap (David Calder) asks another (a surprisingly cast Murray Melvin) why the deerslayer isn’t on the top table, the answer is that Fawcett ‘made a rather unfortunate choice of ancestors’.  The early conversations between Percy and his wife Nina (Sienna Miller) convey her keen frustration that her husband hasn’t received what she considers his military just deserts.  But the Irish prologue also supplies hints that a more generic kind of life-story-telling is in the offing.  After three-year-old Jack (Tom Mulheron) has witnessed his father’s triumph in the hunt, Percy tells his excited infant son, with biopic clairvoyance, ‘One day, you and I will hunt together …’   When they eventually go to the Amazon, they themselves become the prey of hunters.  Jack (now Tom Holland: the intervening seven-year-old boy is played, in a brief appearance, by Billy Smalldridge) fears they’re about to be killed by native ‘savages’ but Percy tells him calmly that, ‘Whatever happens is our destiny’.  That kind of remark in this kind of film is always meant to be totally reassuring, though I’m not sure why.

    Fawcett first goes to South America on a frontier-surveying assignment on behalf of the Royal Geographical Society, the RGS having been commissioned by the Bolivian government to act as an impartial third party in mapping an area on the border of Brazil and Bolivia, at what John Hemming calls ‘the height of the great Amazon rubber boom’.  At this point, Fawcett enters uncharted territory within the Bolivian jungle and James Gray familiar terrain for a based-on-a-true-adventure-story narrative:  the ‘dramatic’ incidents and conflicts between characters that follow are just what you’d expect.  The film stays put in this terrain for the next two hours – except for the odd aberrant sequence, such as an exchange between Fawcett and an almost hysterically animated RGS audience, to which he first makes public his belief in Z.   The hero interrupts his exploring to resume soldiering, during the Great War; the trench warfare scenes have the perfunctory quality of an interlude.  Two other, related things lend the film a kind of distinctiveness:  Gray accentuates the negative more than a mainstream Hollywood director of yesteryear would likely have done, and Charlie Hunnam’s performance in the lead makes Fawcett appear dutifully dogged rather than flamboyantly obsessive in his quest.  I guess it’s the combination of predictability and earnestness that has led some admirers of The Lost City of Z to describe it as ‘classical’ big-picture cinema à la David Lean.  It was a combination of the last letter of the alphabet and wishful thinking that Gray’s film might get entertaining which kept linking Fawcett’s lost city in my mind with the Emerald City in The Wizard of Oz.

    Charlie Hunnam’s facial expressions are occasionally expressive; vocally, he’s not only colourless but always sounds like an actor reading lines – usually with forced elocution.  He is, and looks, younger than Fawcett was even in 1905 although Hunnam’s aging make-up is good.  Twenty-year-old Tom Holland is actually the right age to play Jack Fawcett (who was twenty-two when he accompanied his father on the last, doomed expedition) but he’s weirdly more effective as an adolescent – as an adult, his voice sounds barely to have broken.  Robert Pattinson, though he sometimes looks to be trying to hide behind a large beard, manages to get a bit of individuality into the part of Fawcett’s long-standing aide-de-camp.   Clive Francis and Ian McDiarmid do well as RGS bigwigs.  The Amazonian jungle is no place for a woman, of course.  This is a pity, because Sienna Miller’s acting is freer and more communicative than anyone else’s, even though the loyal-wife-cum-feisty-woman-ahead-of-her time role she’s playing is weakly contrived.

    28 March 2017

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