The Great Movies III

After the brief opening wedding scene, the story rejoins Maria and her mother immediately after World War II, when they are sharing a flat carved out of a bombed building. She believes her husband, Hermann (Klaus Lowitsch), is dead, although she haunts rail stations with his photograph. The population is starving and desperate; when an American GI tosses away a cigarette butt, a dozen Germans scramble for it. Maria applies for a job in a nightclub for American soldiers; it's located in a high school gym where she once attended school, and she mounts the parallel bars, which are still in place, and more or less orders the owner to give her the job. Her mother (Gisela Uhlen) alters the hem of her skirt while fretting that Maria's father would have been heartbroken to see his daughter as a bar girl; then she says she hopes somebody gives Maria some nylons.

The B-girl joint is the first step on Maria's relentless climb to success. We follow her from about 1946 to the mid-195os. There is a black American soldier she is fond of (they share the movie's only scene of physical affection), but when her husband unexpectedly returns and finds them in bed, she settles the matter by breaking a bottle over the GI's head. She did not plan to kill him, but he's dead. Her husband tells the court he did it and is sentenced to prison. Maria remains fiercely loyal to this absent spouse, who is essentially a stranger, for all the rest of the film; perhaps it is her form of loyalty to Germany in its defeat.

The most sympathetic character is Oswald (Ivan Desny), a manufacturer who sat out the war in comfort, perhaps in exile, and has returned to take over the reins of his business from his faithful accountant, Senkenberg (Hark Bohm). Maria crashes first class during a train ride, forces Oswald to notice her, tells him to hire her, and asks him to sleep with her: "I wanted to make the first move before you could," she tells him, and later, "You're not having an affair with me. I'm having an affair with you."

Poor Oswald would marry her, but she is married. She calls him up when she wants sex, humiliates him, says she is fond of him, and then treats him distantly. Yet all the time, she is an ideal employee, quickly rising from "personal assistant" to the company's key decision-maker. At one business meeting, translating the English of a customer, she changes it to reflect what she thinks Oswald should hear in order to do what she has decided he should do.

The cinematographer Ballhaus worked with Fassbinder on a dozen films in nine years, then "burned out," resigned, and started working for Martin Scorsese, who by comparison "was like a dream." Maria Braun was their final film together; observe how they like to keep the camera moving, through elegant setups in which characters and locations are arranged so that the fluid visuals flow from long shots through closeups without cutting, often moving behind walls, peering through doors and windows, looking around posts, so that the characters seem jammed into the space around them.

Notice, too, the gradual evolution of Maria Braun from a desperate scavenger to a rich beauty; Hanna Schygulla, who met Fassbinder in school and starred in twenty of his films, had an uncanny ability to float just out of range of analysis, as if she were not acting but getting her effects through dreamy murderous impulses-that despite the fact that every shot was precisely blocked and the dialogue has the precision and brutality of a play by Neil LaBute.

Maria has a childhood friend named Betti (Elisabeth Trissenaar) who marries another friend, Willi (Gottfried John). With both of them, she sometimes returns to bombed-out buildings, where she climbs up rubble-blocked staircases in her high heels, peering down through twisted beams and remembering that this room was their classroom, and that one was-but why is she doing this? I think because she gains a savage energy from these reminders of how her world was blown to pieces. When a black marketeer (Fassbinder) offers her a rare edition of books, she says, "Books burn too fast, and they don't give any heat."

Maria is always honest, uses no deception, admits she is toying with Oswald, is coldly amused at his weakness. It is the sentimental accountant Senkenberg who loves Oswald best, but he loves the company, too, and sees that Maria is good for it. Her conversations with Oswald are like the sparkling wit of screwball comedy, rotated into psychological cruelty. She orders him to meet her at a restaurant and is already eating when he arrives. He confesses he was frightened to come; she has him so off-balance he has no idea how to please her.' They quarrel. "Why don't we just leave?" he asks. "Because," she says, "you were well brought up, and I pretend that I was."