Dream girl

Fassbinder's hard-hearted Hanna

by Jeffrey Gantz

Toward the end of Fernando Trueba's new La niña de tus ojos ("The Girl of Your Dreams"), which is about a Spanish film troupe in 1938 Berlin, Magda Goebbels -- Joseph's wife -- makes an appearance. This large stout woman illuminates the screen with her radiating intelligence and commanding presence, but it wasn't till the credits rolled (at the Berlin Film Festival back in February) that I realized who the actress is: Hanna Schygulla.

From 1969 to 1980, Schygulla was a Rainer Werner Fassbinder regular, appearing in such films as Liebe ist kalter als der Tod ("Love Is Colder Than Death"), Die bitteren Tränen der Petra von Kant ("The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant"), Effi Briest, Die Ehe der Maria Braun ("The Marriage of Maria Braun"), Die dritte Generation ("The Third Generation"), and Lili Marleen. Blonde, leggy, and full of life, she was the closest thing Germany had to a Marlene Dietrich or a Marilyn Monroe; the poster for The Marriage of Maria Braun, with Schygulla in hat, camisole, nylons, and high heels, was worldwide pin-up material. This Tuesday (April 27), the Harvard Film Archive is showing The Marriage of Maria Braun (1978) and Lili Marleen (1980) as part of its "New German Cinema" series, providing a good opportunity to get reacquainted with both Schygulla and Fassbinder.

The Marriage of Maria Braun (which got the Silver Bear at Berlin in 1979, behind Peter Lilienthal's David) made Fassbinder an international star; Lili Marleen was a flop. The odd thing is that they're essentially the same movie, the first set in the post-war years (it ends in 1954, at the moment when the German national soccer team wins its first World Cup), the second during WW2. In both, Schygulla plays a woman who loves a man she can't be with. Hermann Braun (Klaus Löwitsch) is sent off to the front after half a day and a whole night of marriage to Maria; he's reported dead and she takes up with an American GI, but when Hermann unexpectedly reappears, Maria slugs the GI with a bottle and he dies. Hermann takes the rap and goes to jail; Maria gets a job with a manufacturer and becomes her boss's mistress so as to make a future for herself and Hermann. In Lili Marleen, Aryan Swiss chanteuse Willie falls for Jewish Underground member Robert (Giancarlo Giannini), but his distrusting father (Mel Ferrer) gets her thrown out of Switzerland, whereupon she records "Lili Marleen" and becomes the toast of Nazi Germany, all the while still loving Robert.

With Lola and Veronika Voss (both 1981), The Marriage of Maria Braun and Lili Marleen make up Fassbinder's unofficial "Mata-Haris of the German Economic Miracle" quartet; all four feed off the dialectic between love and money. What Schygulla introduces into her pair is a strain of German romantic idealism. At her trial, Maria tries to explain that she was enamored of the American GI but loves her husband, a distinction (between verlieben and lieben in German) that's lost on her prosecutors. She closes a deal with an American businessman by spending a half-hour alone with him -- and in a Henry Jamesian touch, Fassbinder declines to show or tell us what happens, as if to say it's not important and none of our business. Visiting Hermann in prison, she doesn't hesitate to tell him that she's sleeping with her boss. Even that relationship eventually reduces to the essentials: Maria rings up her boss, says, "Herr Oswald, I need someone to sleep with," hangs up. Willie becomes a Berlin celebrity through Nazi patronage; Fassbinder doesn't tell us whether she has to sell her body, but of course by propping up the German war effort she's selling out Robert's people, so she tries to help by smuggling out concentration-camp film.

It's all hopeless, of course. At the outset Robert's too cowed by his father to run away with Willie. Later his father tells him she's dead; when Willie makes her way back to Zurich after the war, she finds that Robert has married a nice Jewish girl. And Hermann would have been smarter to have Maria plead rape and self-defense. When he finally turns up on the doorstep of the house Maria has bought for them, it transpires that he's made a deal with her boss, a deal that destroys her faith in him, in their future. Worse, they're strangers with nothing in common -- her idealism melts in face of reality. Maria Braun's shooting script had the film ending à la Jules et Jim, with Maria driving the car she and Hermann are in over an embankment; but the actual explosive conclusion is scarcely less ambiguous.

Fassbinder's heroines do what they have to do, and Fassbinder challenges us to say they could have done more. Yet Schygulla does. In a duplicitous, conniving, money-talks world (Fassbinder stacks the deck by having both Hermann and Willie reported dead), her face keeps lighting up, as if she were discovering something Fassbinder had overlooked. The way Maria runs about the house getting ready for Hermann (Fassbinder's ironic counterpoint to the soccer action) suggests there's something out there worth running for. Twenty years later, Schygulla has stopped running (or perhaps that stoutness is Magda's and not her own), but she's still sexy, still smart, still the girl of your dreams.