Lola

"Lola" (1981), the second chapter of Fassbinder's BRD Trilogy is an update and a remake (in a way) of "The Blue Angel"(1930) directed by Josef von Sternberg with magnificent Marlene Dietrich as a singer Lola Lola but Fassbinder's film is marvelous by itself. Like "Marriage of Maria Braun" (1979) and "Veronica Voss" (1982) "Lola" tells the story of a strong and beautiful woman and her survival and search for love, success and happiness in postwar Germany. It's superb and dazzling and I kept smiling all time while I was watching it. It's an old story (and what is new in this world? Carmen had been dead and Lola Lola is old) but the style, the approach, the times, the place, his use of colors that seem to sing, to smile, to scream and to touch you gently are unique. Did he sell his soul to the Devil for these colors? The dresses, the songs, Barbara's voice, her legs that grow from the ears, her hair, oh my God, her and Hanna's (in "Marriage of Maria Braun that I will finish watching tonight) golden hair, these witching Loreleis, the walking sensuality - Fassbinder understood and admired women and I admire him for this.

"Lola" is a combination of many genres- satire, drama, comedy, and musical. It mixes glamor with very serious themes. Striking Barbara Sukowa is a singer-whore Lola who sets up to seduce the incorruptible local building commissioner, unbelievably blue-eyed Armin Mueller-Stahl. Lola went through many losses, humiliations, and disappointments during the war and right after it and she wants to be an independent business woman for which she decided to win over the man everyone kept telling was not for her.

As Barbara Sukowa recalls, Fassbinder told the critical stories but he did not make them dry or theoretical. He did not use the intellectual or academic approach to his stories. He hated gray "kitchen" naturalism and he was mixing Hollywood glamor with specific German realities creating his own style that was sexy and appealing. While many German film makers of his generation were influenced by the American directors like Martin Scorsese and John Cassavetes, Fassbinder was very impressed by Douglas Sirk and his style.

Rainer Werner Fassbinder died at the age of 37 just as he was completing his last movie, "Querell". He had made over 30 films during 12 years. He began directing in 1969 revealing in his work New Germany, often heartless and materialistic. Fassbinder's talent and the quantity and quality of his output are incredible. It is like he knew he would die young and he was obsessed by finishing as many films as it was physically possible, majority of which (including "Lola") were way ahead of their time.

Part of his loose BRD (Bundesrepublik Deutschland) Trilogy - portraits of women in German society after the war - this late Fassbinder is based on the same story behind Sternberg's Blue Angel. Lola is a nightclub singer and prostitute, personal whore of larger-than-life property developer Schukert, at a red-light establishment favoured by the mayor and his cronies. Into this cosy, corrupt world comes a new Building Commissioner, Von Bohm – a meticulous character that the others cannot draw into their circle. With plenty of building going on in Germany during the 50s, Von Bohm is an important official whom the mayor must somehow get around in order to continue bending the rules on lucrative construction deals. By coincidence, Von Bohm meets and falls in love with Lola, unaware that she is a prostitute. When he finds out, he is devastated, but finally, by way of pragmatism, a moral compromise is reached – boy, are they compromised - and the film comes to rest on a somewhat absurd moral sandbank.

None of the characters are likable – they are all seedy local politicians, after all, but they slowly grow on us. Schukert, in particular takes some getting used to. Fassbinder takes delight in showing us that everyone is corrupt – even apparently incorruptible people. Everyone has a weakness, which is their price. Both money and desire corrupts and debases – it's inevitable - you might as well be practical about it, take pity on yourself and embrace it. In particular, corruption is the price of having eroticism in the world – and that's something we can't do without.

As the film goes along, the darkish tone gives way to levity once you realise that nobody is really going to get hurt. There are some genuinely pensive and romantic moments as well as some fairly gently humour - Von Bohm's neurotic secretary is quite funny. Very little is convincing though - particularly the Von Bohm's infatuation (he seems a little too old, and a little too naive) – and the outcome is even less so. There's very little reliable sociology going on here. Women are viewed as chattels and Lola herself is not really given an adequate personality – nor was Barbara Sukowa noteworthy in the part.

It's worth watching if only for it's striking visual design. The film is lit throughout in lurid primary colours – even outside in broad daylight faces are bathed in coloured light. Perhaps these colours spread outwardly from the nightclub's red light, diffracting through the ordinary world into rainbow hues. It is sometimes intrusive, but mainly effective and attractive.

Fassbinder has extracted one aspect of social behaviour and amplified it to absurdity here. This is not the way the world is, but is perhaps the way he would like it to be: fallible and corrupt, but erotic and benign.

Von Bohm is from East-Prussia, his two "weaknesses" are "East-Prussian human beings and West-Frisian tea", he tells to Lola's mother who works as his house-keeper after he has been elected as the new head of the construction department by the city of Coburg. Coburg - as any German city in the time of the "Wirtschaftswunder" - is a place "where people have an outer and an inner life, and both have nothing to do with one another". Although Von Bohm agrees, he has not a ghost of an idea that the elegant and beautiful young lady who gets his hand-kiss is in her "inner" life the attraction of the local bordello where the "crows" (major, police president, politicians, heads of the governmental departments) and the "vulture" (Schuckert) reunite every evening while their wives are knitting at home or are already asleep.

It is amazing what Fassbinder made out of the Heinrich Mann-Von Sternberg drama "Professor Unrat" or "The Blue Angel", respectively. Fassbinder's Lola is not a man-murdering and at last unreachable "beauty" like the (not so beautiful) Marlene Dietrich, but a girl who has to nourish her little daughter and still has the hope for a better live. She is "open" for everybody and does not flirt with the distance. In the opposite: On the stage she goes from hand to hand and is something like a collective propriety of the "Creme De La Creme" of the little city. (The figure of Esslin - whose name is close to Enslin -, who quotes Bakunin in Lola's Boudoir, is probably the rest that remained from the original protagonist character of Professor Unrat.) Therefore, Fassbinder's Lola is not about the decrease of a society member by entering the "wrong" society, but about her way to become a part of her society and Von Bohm's desire to possess his beloved "object". This is managed in an almost fairy-tale-like style, typically (and ironically) for the Germany of the Adenauer-era, so that in the end everybody looks happy, since everybody got what he wanted: Lola says to Mrs. Schuckert: "Now I belong to you". Schuckert earns his 3 millions of D-Marks from the "Lindenhof", the Mayor will be reelected, and Von Bohm gets Lola. Then, Lola's little daughter asks him: "Are you happy now?". Von Bohm answers a bit hesitatingly by "Yes". Unlike Professor Unrat, he does not pay with his life for his love, but probably with his soul.

Satirical to the core, this movie is interesting in its realistic illustration of post-war small time corruption. Fassbinder has an extraordinary light touch, and it is a fascinating ride through the endemic connivance's of the petit-bourgeois wheeler-dealers of a small German city. One can actually hear Fassbinder giggling in the background as he brings the universal character of the average conformist-hustler to the screen.

Barbara Sukowa as Lola, is a magnificent actress, especially where she accepts the humiliations of her life, but will not allow them to transform her into the brutalized animal level of behavior, that she observes all around her. Always optimistic, she pursues her goal {to escape from the prison of degradation, she is in}. We, {the viewers}, follow her journey, as she overcomes obstacle after obstacle, to eventually triumph, and take her place as a citizen of her particular Peyton Place.

How she does it is colorful and informative. Fassbinder gives you all the different strata of class prejudice, as the money men are in cahoots with the bureaucrats, who are all, in turn, driven by libidinal desires. Mixing up cabaret elements, together with the controlling power of money, blended in with, the huge heart of those that earn their crust as sex workers {this, is so obviously where Fassbinder's sympathies lie}. Fassbinder has used high cinematic values in this movie, where all the characters, {ultimately}, believe that "Cash is King". Kitsch is displayed with the usual Fassbinder panache and as with many other movie portrayals of prostitution, the more sordid side, such as violence and intimidation, and the risk to health, are not mentioned, giving the otherwise sharp satire of the corrupt financial world, a rather fairy tale gloss.

Fassbinder, who always understood the paramount need to entertain, still manages to convey the malaise, that the aftermath of the Nazi demolition of all moral standards, which had left an entire nation bereft of a natural ethos of right and wrong. Fassbinder gives you entertainment and awareness, a difficult tightrope to straddle.

Fassbinder, like Diogenes, was always in search of an honest man. He had a celebratory attitude to life, and his mirth is infectious.

This looks absolutely wonderful throughout with astonishingly colourful lighting and much use of red and blue. The drawback is that with all the scenes similarly lit with bright colours a certain level of artifice is created. This is fantastic for the most effective night club scenes but becomes rather distracting elsewhere when we are being asked to take seriously the Blue Angel inspired antics of the well meaning older man and the flighty young dancer. It also distracts somewhat from the financial shenanigans. Overall, however, we get the drift and Fassbinder is once more trying to bring some awareness to a German population in denial, that they did not only loose the war but their very identity in the aftermath with all the divisions brought upon the nation by Russia and the West. Barbara Sukowa stars as the Dietrich type figure and very well she does too as she flirts with the corrupt property developer and the supposed socialist leaning reforming inspector. Awash with the benefits of the 'economic miracle' much helped by the funds plowed in for the rebuild, her actions ensure that the old man gets what he wants, the developer similarly and she sails off into the sunset, immorality levels safely restored.