Director: Rainer Werner Fassbinder
Starring: Rosel Zech, Hilmar Thate, Cornelia Froboess, Annemarie Duringer
Poor Veronika, always in some kind of prison"Love is the best, most insidious, most effective instrument of social repression." -- Ranier Werner Fassbinder
We move from love to suffocation. Everybody is trapped and repressed by something in this movie, whether it's drugs or other people. They want to be free to express art, because, as Veronika says, if you're not free your art isn't free
The contrasts lighting is high and intense. The whites are so blown out sometimes that the darks get sucked in. It's brutal and illuminating. There are plenty of fun little references to UFA, usually in things said by the characters, but more often by the Expressionist sets (what's a mirror ball doing at the drug clinic?). Everything is blank, brutal, cold and full of misery. The war imprisoned Germany, which is then imprisoned by Americans with their black market morphine and their silly music ("The Battle of New Orleans" by Johnny Horton in particular). No one escapes until they die.
Yeah, it was a fun Friday night.
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