birthdaynoodle 'The Marriage of Maria Braun' is German director Rainer Werner Fassbinder's best-known and most financially successful movie and it's not hard to see why: it's a big event, a tour de force. This melodrama tells the story of an audacious, beautiful woman who puts her survival instinct to use during the early post-war era, when capitalist West Germany arose from the ashes. The film begins as she's getting married amidst the chaos of the last day of World War II in 1945, and much of what follows has to do with the peculiar way in which she devotes herself to her absent, yet somehow always present, idealized husband. The character of Maria is fascinating as a person, but it also serves as an allegory for Germany during this period of reconstruction, now generally referred to as the "economic miracle" ("Wirtschaftswunder"). Hanna Shygulla gives a perfect performance as the gorgeous and strong-willed Maria. She and Fassbinder were close and had worked together in many plays and films, including 'The Bitter Tears of Eva Von Kant', in 1972. By the time they made 'The Marriage of Maria Braun' in 1979, four years had passed since their last collaboration, so they both regarded it as a special reunion. To me, the film is a testament of the director's nostalgia and adoration for his diva. He was infamously difficult with many of his actors and actresses, yet is said to have treated Shygulla with a special kind of tenderness, and I believe it shows here. Fassbinder was openly gay, but married twice. His relationships with his first wife, Ingrid Caven, and Moroccan male lover El Hedi Ben Salem, both important actors in his films, are known to have been especially tempestuous. This pattern of love/hate may reflect on some of the characters in his work. He was accused (perhaps unfairly) by some feminists of being misogynistic and by some gay critics of being homophobic. I haven't watched enough of his films to have an opinion on this. But I sense there's a very particular, mixed energy projected onto the character of Maria Braun, who is both hero and antihero, someone who has an admirable tenacity to overcome adversity, yet is willing to prostitute herself and stop at nothing in order to accomplish her goals. It's this complexity that makes the film interesting. Nothing here is easily spelled out as right or wrong.'The Marriage of Maria Braun' is the first part of Fassbinder's BRD (Bundesrepublik Deutschland) trilogy, along with 'Veronica Voss' (1982) and 'Lola' (1981), which is made available as a set by the Criterion Collection. ('Veronica Voss' was filmed last, but is meant to be viewed as the second part of the trilogy.)

tieman64 Rainer Werner Fassbinder's most profitable film, "The Marriage of Maria Braun" tells the tale of an upwardly mobile, independent Maria Braun (Hanna Schygulla), a woman who uses a combination of business smarts, tenacity and promiscuity to lift herself out of desperation. Fassbinder was drawn to female characters, and often wrote them well. Here he observes as Braun weasels her way back and forth, buying low cut dresses to impress Americans, learning English, framing her husband and killing men to ensure her future. "It's a bad time for feelings," she says, before worming her way into a German mega-corporation which does big business overseas. From here she turns her back on all outsiders (primarily the United States, which forced debts upon and dismantled industries across post war Germany) and tactically sleeps with her new boss. We then watch as she becomes increasingly wealthy, whilst all around the less fortunate remain burdened with post-war, national guilt. But guilt is precisely what Maria does not allow herself; she crushes all in her path. "I'm a master of deceit," she says, "a capitalist tool by day, by night an agent of the proletarian masses. I am the Mata Hari of the economic miracle." Quickly it becomes apparent that Maria represents West Germany's own rise out of World War 2's rubble, a nation casting off the chains of an insincere American Occupation and brushing off the ashes of defeat. Braun's not just an opportunist, but delights in saying what everyone wants to hear. She makes promises to every class and every country, but only to curry favour and pursue her own wants. It's a kitchen gas explosion which kills her - and symbolic ends an unholy marriage between east and west - distributing her body in all directions, an event which coincides with Germany's victory in a world-championship soccer match. Germany has been reborn, its socioeconomic progress cannot be contained. It is hungry (we hear Germany literally beating Hungary on a radio football match) and ready to explode onto the world stage.Contrasted with Wirtschaftswunder, Germany's economic miracle or post-war rise, is a rise in what Fassbinder saw as "everyday", "benign", "soft" fascism. Germany becomes a giant, but the power plays which got her there are precisely those which continue to influence, scar and weight heavy on her own inhabitants. "Is this worth it?" Fassbinder asks. His next film was "The Third Generation", a black comedy about revolutionaries or "terrorists". It plays like the spiritual sequel to "The Marriage of Maria Braun".8/10 - Worth one viewing.

rory-campbell Maria Braun is an extraordinary woman presented fully and very credibly, despite being so obtuse as to border on implausibility. She will do everything to make her marriage work, including shameless opportunism and sexual manipulation. And thus beneath the vicey exterior, she reveals a rather sweet value system. The film suffers from an abrupt and unexpected ending which afterwards feels wholly inadequate, with the convenience familiar from ending your school creative writing exercise with 'and then I woke up'. It is also book-ended at the other end with the most eccentric title sequence I've ever seen, but don't let any of that put you off.

ravcsv54-1 This film exhibits artful cinematic techniques wherein instead of landscape capturing the attention of the camera it is small details in how someone appears, how the woman may be wearing a cocktail hat and wrapped in a sheet. How the husband may be wearing a hat and socks and shoes and his underwear and both seem so completely at ease and comfortable. How provocative the woman is posed is another feature of the tableau that the director chooses to let us know she is a free spirit sexually and aims to get the pleasure she seeks without flirting directly or with any particular sensitivity to what the man may be feeling. The relationship between the wife and husband is unique. It is an open one wherein she holds nothing back, feels no particular shame for how she has behaved and wants to share these facts with him because her primary focus always is on the fact of their marriage. Nothing and no one can come between the two of them. Only the chances of fate can intervene---his imprisonment during the war and what follows after his return at long last. A very intriguing film which is totally absorbing.