Fassbinder's most lavish production sacrifices little of his talent for identifying and deconstructing a locus of suffering in long, mobile takes that somehow also act as social encapsulations; here, it's much more overt, since the story takes place in war-torn Germany at the end of WWII, and the central character is a woman (Hanna Schygulla as Maria) who capitalizes on vulnerabilities (both economic and gender-related) to catapult herself up the ladder of a prominent textile corp. that makes coveted goods like lederhosen available to indigent workers (as she once was). Married amidst allied air raids, Maria and her new husband Herrmann are allowed a brief honeymoon before he's shipped out to the Russian front. In his absence, her despair is great: she spends most days at the train station, waiting for him to return. When he is reported dead, she abruptly stops grieving and takes a job as a barmaid/prostitute at a brothel catering to American GI's.

When he returns, things get plenty messy, as circumstances (and his sense of noble self-sacrifice) conspire to keep them apart. The message is Fassbinder's M.O. writ large: 'Love is colder than death,' but not only is Maria contending with her own sanity and a husband largely incapable of loving her, but a country in deep flux with no discernible light at the end of the tunnel. Fassbinder is making some kind of statement on post-war Germany selling out to the highest bidder, but as with all his films, I tend to block those elements out and focus on the unbearable passions on display: Fassbinder's as evoked through his characters; his actors' as filtered through their real-life connections with Fassbinder. Taken together, his films can be either unbearable or indescribably mesmeric, often at once; this falls somewhere in-between, although definitely closer to the latter. While I didn't like it quite as much as The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant or Katzelmacher, Maria Braun certainly has a greater scope and what's more, I could feel its passion and authentic detail to human emotions.

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ii.