Cinematic revolutions are as much a matter of new styles of performance as of new modes of storytelling and image-making. Directors obviously don’t invent actors, but they do more than create showcases—their ideas about performance help propel actors to stardom. (These styles also often stick to the actors, who carry forward the aura and the art of the directors whose visions they helped embody.) The revival of Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s 1981 modernist melodrama “Lola,” at Film Forum’s virtual cinema, starting Friday, is an example of such an achievement. Along with the furious outpouring of imagination and creative energy for which his career is remembered, Fassbinder stands out for his role in launching a generation of actors, including the star of “Lola,” Barbara Sukowa.
The film is the third to last of Fassbinder’s prodigious but truncated career. (He died the following year, at the age of thirty-seven, having directed thirty-nine features and two TV series—one of which, “Berlin Alexanderplatz,” is fifteen hours long.) “Lola” is set in 1957, in the town of Coburg, West Germany, at the crucial intersection of business, politics, and sex. Its protagonist, Marie-Louise, a.k.a. Lola (Sukowa), sings and dances at a night club that doubles as a brothel. She is kept by the town’s biggest businessman, Schuckert (Mario Adorf), a glad-handing construction executive who is at the center of the town’s real-estate ventures—and, unbeknownst to the townspeople, the father of Lola’s young daughter, Marie (Ulrike Vigo). Local officials do favors for Schuckert, and he greases their palms and lines their pockets. Meanwhile, a drummer in the club’s house band, a young socialist and civil servant named Esslin (Matthias Fuchs), who despises Schuckert, is hopelessly in love with Lola.
A new building commissioner shows up—the aristocratic and upright Von Bohm (Armin Mueller-Stahl), a shining embodiment of a new generation of rational, efficient, and honest bureaucrats and, as such, a potential threat to Schuckert’s shady deals. The one thing that the capitalist Schuckert and the socialist Esslin agree on is that Von Bohm isn’t the kind of man for Lola—which arouses her sense of blood sport. When she meets Von Bohm, she sees prey and opportunity, and as she pursues him, she incites a multidimensional overlap of triangles, both romantic and political, which sparks the three men’s various plots of revenge and highlights the sharp and thin lines along which women at the time could find a measure of freedom and autonomy.
The politics of the story are cunningly present in the film’s setup. Coburg is no random town but a political hotspot, a former crucible of Nazi power; in the early days of Hitler’s agitations, it was the first German city to elect a Nazi mayor and to send a Nazi representative to the Reichstag. Now, in the late fifties, it is also very close to the border of East Germany and the Iron Curtain surrounding the Soviet bloc, and thus peculiarly prone to see Communism as a looming menace (and the left-wing activist Esslin as a problem). “Lola” is centered on West Germany’s “economic miracle” of the postwar years, and lifts the veil on the corruption—political, industrial, emotional, and sexual—on which it depended, while also underscoring the ugly irony that the economy was growing and the construction business booming in order to make up for wartime destruction and cover up the spectre of Nazism. That wreckage is present everywhere in the film at a human level, in the loss of lives, the scattering of families, and the ambient presence of the wounded and the traumatized.
Throughout the film, Fassbinder faces the town’s sordid history derisively and dramatically, whether in dialogue that spotlights unresolved grief or that vents blithely unchallenged prejudices, or in a dramatic scene of romantic dash and flair that propels the action into high gear. These reckonings are as much a matter of style as of substance: Fassbinder reincarnates the coruscating labyrinths of power and passion of the great Hollywood melodramas of the time in which the movie is set. The locations and sets are riots of color: painted surfaces, gaudy costumes, incongruously colorful lights and gleams, glows and reflections, dissonant rainbows all tumbling together in one image or clashing cymbal-like in consecutive ones. (For instance, in a scene in which Lola schemes to run into Von Bohm at the small public library, the striated Venetian-blind shadows of film-noir fame put stripes on the spines of gumball-colored books.) The visual compositions have a florid intensity to match, with sharply contrasting successions of incisively angled images, onrushing tracking shots, and such audaciously idiosyncratic conceits as a pair of board meetings filmed with the camera dashing in a circle around the dozen or so members—first clockwise, then counterclockwise.
What stands out amid this hectic collage of sensory disturbances is the actors’ performances. The movie challenges not the economic incentive, the profit motive, or even the pleasures of the bourgeoisie but their self-deluding good conscience in pursuing self-interest in the name of some higher principle, whether social or traditional, intellectual or religious, even romantic. Fassbinder’s vision of heroism is, above all, found in the triumph of his protagonist, the essential candor of her self-interest, and it’s thrillingly and cannily embodied in Sukowa’s performance. For all of Lola’s behind-the-scenes manipulations of the men in her life, she stages her boldest confrontations in public; Sukowa compactly and precisely crystallizes Lola’s motives in pulling off far-seeing, performative schemes for surviving and overcoming the cavalier cruelty of respectable society’s velvet-gloved hypocrites. In a scene that resounds with the breathless drama of classic Hollywood, for instance, Lola drives up to Von Bohm in her blood-red convertible, interrupting a public ceremony in the town square, to introduce herself to him with a chastely theatrical flourish. (True to Fassbinder’s sardonic genius, the ceremony is the dedication of a monument to the German Army—one that, to proclaim a break with the country’s and the town’s Nazi past, honors Claus von Stauffenberg, a colonel who was arrested and executed after an attempt to assassinate Hitler, in 1944.)
Fassbinder’s artifices get to the truth of the matter—the grandeur and the pathos of the harsh struggles that play out behind and amid the façades of public life. The performances are neither casually natural nor campily hyperbolic; the actors’ high-relief declamation and frozen gestures evoke the tones of classic Hollywood. (Frau Schuckert, played by Rosel Zech, is coiffed and dressed to resemble June Allyson in her lead role in Douglas Sirk’s “Interlude,” which is set in West Germany). Yet Fassbinder renders the stylization of such performances self-consciously theatrical, endowed with controlled physicality, and it’s that tinge of self-awareness that turns the classical cinematic style modern. (Their theatricality is emphasized in Fassbinder’s transitions between scenes, which are done with idiosyncratic dissolves, with one scene going out of focus and the next coming in, as if a curtain were both falling and rising.)
The movie’s performances are based on motives, though not those of the characters’ depth psychology or those pulled from the actors’ own experiences. Rather, they are the motives of deliberate effort, of physicality, gesture, inflection, more like the motives of an acrobat or a mime. But the performances are toned down enough not to push the camera away. Fassbinder’s actors don’t so much play to the camera as confront it, step up to meet it, and his cinematographic construction, avoiding extreme close-ups and oblique or shadowed poses, gives them a theatrical space in which to do so. His self-aware sense of performance carries political implications. The self-aware candor of the actors’ efforts converges with Fassbinder’s cinema of consciousness, not cynical or knowing cinema but a critical one—one that’s critical, in particular, of the history and the condition of West Germany at large. His gimlet eye for the vanity of mythologies and grandiloquence puts him a step ahead of his New German Cinema colleagues Wim Wenders and Werner Herzog. That’s why he’s not just among the greatest of filmmakers but also among the most influential, even now, four decades after his passing.
