Horst in Translation ([email protected]) "Fontane Effi Briest" is a West German movie from the year 1974 and the writer and director is Rainer Werner Fassbinder, although the writer of the original work is of course Theodor Fontane as the title already tells us. It is not one of Fassbinder's earliest works, but he still decided to pick the black-and-white route again, maybe to show how old this story already is. At 140 minutes, it is easily among Fassbinder's longest films. And that's really a negative deal-breaker here. To me, this film dragged a whole lot on many many occasions. I hardly cared for Effi or any of the supporting characters at all as a consequence. And I also really hated the dialogues sometimes. Of course, they were adapted with the exact quotes from Fontane's novel I guess, but I did not like it at all. I usually like Fassbinder when he gives us his view on society or just on how people act within the boundaries of society. There are a handful films from him I really love and some I do not care about particularly, but this one here is really a major disappointment. It is probably my least favorite work from him and it's also not helping that he several actors that appear frequently in his films such as Schygulla, Lommel, Hermann and Böhm. I may be a bit biased as I did not like the recent version starring Julia Jentsch either, but I really only recommend this to huge fans of the Fontane work. Everybody else (even Fassbinder fans) will probably be majorly bored, because it's so different compared to everything else he has done, apart from the very slowly-moving plot. I can only shake my head at other reviewers who call this one of the best films ever made and give it 10 out of 10 stars. Highly not recommended.

timmy_501 By 1974 RW Fassbinder had reached the height of his creative powers. With Fontane - Effi Briest, Fassbinder consistently amazes with his visuals; there's something sublime about his casual mastery of angles, reflections, framing, and camera movements. Given the power of his images it's also somewhat shocking to see how clunky the script is. Fassbinder saddles the film with narration that is only interrupted by tedious, drawn out conversations and extraneous intertitles. Various characters narrate the film at different times but more often than not the narrator is actually omniscient and entirely divorced from the story; this device is just part of a bigger problem: a slavish devotion to the source material that isn't kind to the book or the film. One particularly important moment is conveyed via a stagy, histrionic monologue when it could easily have come out naturally in conversation. Overall, Effi Briest is one of the most frustrating films I've ever seen as the marriage between the amazing visuals and the awkward script is no more successful than the doomed relationship between the naive titular character and her pedantically moralistic husband.

hasosch One the tablets used by Fassbinder in this movie (the same method he shall use 6 years later in "Berlin Alexanerplatz") shows the text: "He put her under pressure wherever he could. So-to-say a calculus of fear" (Fontane). As any other calculi, also the calculus of fear consists of theorems. Speaking about the relationship between Von Instetten and Effi, we have: 1. Never treat her without menacing, but do not show the menace open, so that you can deny it after. 2. Isolate her from society, best make her a child as soon as possible so that she does not get bored. 3. Never praise her for what she is doing, unless in the presence of foreigners. 4. Praise her in front of her parents with whom you should establish a good friendship. If she is complaining later about her marriage, the guilt will be given to her.As the sub-title of the movie says (the longest ever used in a movie): The movie is about those people who are capable to see the unjustness of social rules but don't help changing them, and by doing so, confirm them. "Effi Briest" is therefore a typical Fassbinder movie which he liked to call "melodramas" and thus also a predecessor of his later "women-movies" about Maria Braun, Lola, Lili Marleen and Veronika Voss.That this film is an outstanding masterpiece has nowadays been recognized by all leading film experts around the world. Although Fassbinder let himself sometimes inspire by works of literature, Fontane's "Effi Briest" is one of his only three explicit literature adaptations, besides "Berlin Alexanderplatz" and "Querelle". One could perhaps go as far and say: While in "Effi Briest", society is criticized at the hand of one single, individual fate, in "Berlin Alexanderplatz" a society as a whole is put in the pillory, and in "Querelle" a possible alternative world after all the disgust is shown. Fassbinder made this long way in societal criticism in only eight years, during which he approached the society of the time in which he lived, by systematically coming closer to reach the 50ies of the 20th century (Lola). His movies can be seen as chronicles of different means of suppression by using calculi which turn out to be independent of time.

gsims This film has everything one could ask for: astonishing visual intelligence and imagination, wonderfully evocative, impeccably composed images that draw on silent cinema and painting, all perfectly adapted to the very moving story being told, and the period/milieu in which it unfolds: Effie Briest is presented as enclosed in the many different spaces (most of them - especially the interiors - saturated with stifling formality, social rectitude and conformity) through which she moves and in which she lives, or tries to live (the bird in the cage being a transparent symbol of all this). Quite simply, Fassbinder knows - knew - what "mise en scene" really means. The passage of time is brilliantly handled (through, for example, the use of the fade to white, intertitles and a moving voice-over narration), and the cast is flawless, as well as being flawlessly directed. A film of immense dignity and power, yet it somehow remains understated...