12/29: Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street

Tim Burton's version of the Stephen Sondheim musical Sweeney Todd is a devilishly clever, funny, and creepy ode to misanthropy and vengeance. The title role is the barber Benjamin Barker (Johnny Depp), who renames himself Sweeney Todd after a lengthy enforced absence from London. He was exiled from his home by the powerful Judge Turpin (Alan Rickman), who coveted Barker's beautiful wife, and upon Barker's return over a decade later, he finds that his wife has killed herself and their daughter has been adopted and virtually imprisoned by the judge. He swears vengeance on the judge, and sets up a new barber shop above the decrepit pie shop run by the widow Mrs. Lovett (Helena Bonham Carter). In the course of this vengeful quest, though, his hatred of the judge gradually spreads to the entire human race, and he unleashes a killing drive to rival the most vicious screen serial killers.

It's an unlikely subject for a musical, and though I haven't seen the original staging, Burton's adaptation does a fairly good job of balancing the macabre with the ludicrous, deftly positioning his film between horror and comedy. At the start, though, the production is a bit shaky, and the treatment of the musical numbers initially uncertain and awkward. The opening titles, with their video-game CGI effects, aren't the most promising introduction, but thankfully Burton tones down the CGI throughout most of the film. A few more wide shots of period London are equally distracting, and in an early scene he attempts a rapidly paced tour through the streets of this CGI town, which is badly mangled and so chintzy that it nearly derails the whole opening. Thankfully, once the film settles into interiors, Burton is able to create the atmosphere much more organically, with subtle elements of design and lighting, rather than resorting to entirely computer-created environments.

The opening also falters a bit in the translation of the Sondheim song book from stage to screen. The first musical number takes place in the very first scene after the credits, as Sweeney Todd arrives back in London on a ship. Todd is initially off-camera, and the focus is on the youthful sailor Anthony (Jamie Campbell Bower), who sings an impassioned ode to London's joys. He's interrupted when Todd suddenly steps forward, taking over the foreground of the shot, and presents a much darker vision of London: "There's a hole in the world like a great black pit/ and the vermin of the world inhabit it." This is a perfect translation of the stage dynamic into cinematic visuals, allowing Todd's face to enter the frame and physically blot out Anthony just as his darker worldview pervades the narrative. But the rest of this number is handled much more clumsily, with the editing chopping up the song and switching in between lines to slightly different angles on Todd's face. Whereas the first entrance of Todd is deftly handled with a real awareness of space and framing, the rest of the scene disrupts this spatial care by pointlessly switching angles and cutting around the central figure as he sings. Musical numbers inevitably work best when there's a sense of space and movement built into them, and Burton's unmotivated cutting only calls attention to the lack of spatial definition in this scene. His edits here seem intended only to get "cool" angles on Depp's perpetually photogenic face, not to preserve the flow of the scene or the song.

Fortunately, once Todd arrives at Mrs. Lovett's pie shop, things get much better, and much smoother. It's even easy to forget about Depp's substandard singing voice when the musical numbers are so much fun, and the diabolical wit of the lyrics stings with practically every line. The introduction of Helena Bonham Carter, looking her frizzed-out, voluptuous, raccoon-eyed Marla Singer best, is also very welcome. She infuses her role with world-weary pathos and casually pragmatic cruelty, and does a much better job than Depp with the vocal duties, to boot. From her very first number, "The Worst Pies in London," it's clear that she adds a much-needed sardonic edge to the film's brutality, a sense that the violence and ugliness of this film reflects a world of poverty, rigidly defined class structures, and common people sadly resigned to their fates. Only Sweeney Todd is truly discontented enough with his rotten lot in life to do anything about it, and he strikes out in the most hideous ways, his every horrifying act a reflection of the horrors inflicted upon him and his class by society.

Once Mrs. Lovett enters the narrative as Todd's foil and partner, the film soars, and the clumsiness of the opening few scenes is quickly forgotten. These two engage in wittily arranged numbers, like the scene where Todd sings a love song to his razors, while in the background the pitiful Lovett is pining for Todd, their lyrics occasionally joining in identical expressions of love for different objects. Even better are the deliriously naughty pas de deux numbers, like the one where Lovett concocts her fiendish plan for disposing of the bodies Todd leaves behind, and the duo twirl around the shop in a mad dance, bursting with excitement and energy. Their every appearance together is a real joy to watch, even in the potentially silly scene where Mrs. Lovett imagines an idyllic life with Todd by the sea — her hopeful pragmatism and his stoic gloominess provide a perfect counterpoint to the sunny skies and warm colors that are absent everywhere else in the film's grey and brown palette. There's not a scene between these two that doesn't sparkle with weird charm and vivacity, even when the subject of the songs is murder and cannibalism.

The film is less successful when it diverts from this central duo, which it thankfully doesn't do too often. Anthony has a perfunctory role as the wide-eyed innocent who falls for Johanna (Jayne Wisener), Todd's captive daughter, at first sight. His narrative of naïve young love is obviously the exact opposite of Todd's disillusionment with the world, and the film suggests that the only reason for Anthony's optimism is that he hasn't experienced enough yet. Give him time, and he'll head down that path as well. Even the young and beautiful Johanna is tainted by her captivity at the judge's home, and she holds out little hope by the end of the film that anything will ever be better, even once she escapes her tormentor's clutches. This love story is given short shrift in the film, though, and its brief diversions from the central Todd/Lovett plot are mostly unwelcome. Anthony's songs to Johanna may well be a parody of young love's excesses — and lines like "I'll steal you, Johnna" have more than a little tinge of creepiness — but the fact remains that they're saccharine and grating in comparison to the more vibrant Todd and Lovett numbers. It's therefore a good thing that this less interesting couple gets much less screentime, though the result is that their story winds up so under-developed that one wonders why they're here at all — presumably the original play fleshes out their story more fully.

Quibbles aside, Sweeney Todd is an excellent film, a nasty piece of work that fully submerges the audience into the vengeful rage of its protagonist. It's hilarious, disturbing, and blood-drenched, with a razor-sharp gallows humor that slices through nearly every scene, even the goriest ones. Burton has possibly the perfect sensibility for such a delicate balancing act, and as a result the film is witty and vibrant while never flinching away from the bloody physical realities of the violence, which is shown with an at-times nauseating physicality. This emphasis on the brutality of Todd's violence helps to ground the film's fantasy, to keep the flights of song and music rooted in a concrete reality of suffering and sorrow. The result is that the musical numbers are like fantastic dreams, attempts at escape from the morbid reality of a world in which murder does double duty as revenge and good business practices.

12/27: The Man From the Alamo; California

The Man From the Alamo is a Budd Boetticher Western dating from before the director's more well-known association with actor Randolph Scott. In this film, Glenn Ford plays John Stroud, the unfortunate man chosen by lot to leave the Alamo just before it's overrun, in order to head north and try to save his family, along with the families of several other soldiers, who were being attacked in northern Texas. This gesture gets Stroud branded as a coward by those who don't know his goal, and his stigma is heightened when the Alamo falls to the enemy and everyone left inside is killed. To make matters worse, when Stroud arrives in his home town, he finds that all the families he was sent to protect, including his own, have already been murdered — and not by the Mexican army, he learns, but by unscrupulous Texans posing as Mexicans and hoping to enrich themselves in the melee.

Stroud immediately plans to enact his revenge on these rebels, led by the nasty Jess Wade (Victor Jory), but his reputation as a coward precedes him and makes life difficult, particularly in a town where most of the women's husbands are dead at the Alamo. Boetticher seems especially interested in the line between cowardice and bravery, and the question of which side of the line Stroud's departure from the Alamo should fall on. Stroud is introduced, at the beginning of the film, committing a largely senseless act of bravery by leaping up onto the fort's ramparts in the midst of a firefight, running along the ledge and risking death, simply in order to replace the flag on the fort's ramparts, which had been knocked down by a cannon shot. This is conventional bravery, and certainly the movie version of bravery — risking death unnecessarily, even if the immediate aim of the risk is trivial. This action is implicitly contrasted with Stroud's later decision to leave the fort, which is perceived by all who witness it as a shocking display of cowardice. And yet, in this case Stroud has a definite and useful goal in mind, which is to some extent self-serving (protecting his own family) but also selfless and noble (protecting the families of others). That he risks his own reputation in order to achieve this goal adds an additional element of self-sacrifice to his decision.

This examination of bravery and cowardice plays out within a tautly constructed adventure narrative, which Boetticher tells in just 79 minutes, packing the film with action and just enough character detail to render his hero convincingly. Stroud's reputation as a coward also serves as a metaphor for all manner of prejudices and various signs of "weakness" in the harsh world of the American frontier. If being a coward is just about the worst thing with which a man can be branded, it places him only a few notches down from Mexicans, who earned a status of shame by virtue of being both non-white and members of a nation that was at war with Texas. Thus, Stroud further cements his outsider status by bringing around a young Mexican boy who used to work at his now-destroyed ranch, and who he has more or less adopted as a son. Also low in the pecking order are women, who are considered entirely defenseless and in need of a man, and the crippled, who are unable to engage in traditional "manly" pursuits like fighting in the army.

The film exposes all of these underlying assumptions of the Western in its denouement, in which the coward, the one-armed local doctor John Gage (Chill Wills), and a number of women, must defend a wagon train against Wade's marauding gang. With all the menfolk off fighting the Mexican army, it falls to this motley assortment of supporting players, usually relegated to the sidelines in Hollywood Westerns, to take center stage and fight to protect themselves. Boetticher privileges the sideline characters here, bringing them slowly forward in the narrative. When he first introduces them, they're part of the traditional Western structure, under the protective wing of an army detachment. But as the soldiers and all the other able-bodied men head off from the main plotline, into other stories, Boetticher sticks with the wagon train rather than following the soldiers, and all that's left is the bottom tiers of the Western's de-facto caste system.

This deconstruction of the Western is unexpected in a low-budget oater like this, but Boetticher manages to sneak in a great deal of subtext of this sort within the film's fast-moving framework. It's a solid, economical B-Western with a surprisingly complex moral examination at its core, as well as a subtle querying of the Western's biases and ideological blind spots.

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California is director John Farrow's epic ode to the resiliency of the frontier spirit, and especially to the beauty of the eponymous state, whose statehood is the dilemma at the center of this film. Set in the period of the first gold strikes in California, and the ensuing mass migration to the largely unsettled land, the film charts the progression of the territory from a totally lawless frontier, to a speculative land ripe for exploitation, to the cusp of statehood and entry into the "civilized" boundaries of the Union. This civilizing narrative is often at the heart of the classical Hollywood Westerns, which as a body of work are about the tension between the "wild" West and the gradually spreading society of the then-nascent United States. Here, this tension is localized in California, where the twin aims of gold and power conspire to keep the territory uncivilized and free of laws for as long as possible.

When the film starts, John Trumbo (Ray Milland) is an army deserter who agrees to lead a wagon train of farmers west to California in order to escape his past. Along with the farmers, he reluctantly brings aboard the volatile Lily (Barbara Stanwyck), who is spurned by the locals as a woman of ill repute, though the film never makes it clear whether she's earned this reputation or not. But as soon as the wagons set off, the announcement that gold has been struck in California reaches them, and the farmers all immediately abandon the train in a mad scramble west, leaving behind only Trumbo and the Irish farmer Michael Fabian (Barry Fitzgerald). The two eventually make it west, and find the expected gold rush fever, with the town in the tight grip of the tyrannical former slave trader Pharoah Coffin (George Coulouris). As if his name isn't a good enough clue, Coffin is the film's villain, a cartoonishly exaggerated mustache-stroking kind of villain in the grand old tradition, pure evil kitsch. His evil is also shot through with a solid dose of fear and cowardice, especially from his slave-ship past — at one point, a breeze through the trees reminds him of the sound of "naked feet shuffling on the deck."

Once Trumbo and Fabian arrive in this Coffin-controlled town, the film begins leaping frantically forward, constantly shifting style and never quite settling on just what kind of film this is supposed to be. At one point, it's a rollicking gold rush adventure, then a gambling drama, then a chronicle of political manipulations, then an epic shootout. It even tries to be a folksy musical at intervals, though it falls entirely on its face at that — in the song Stanwyck tries to sing herself, she proves a much worse singer than an actress, and a later more tender song is obviously overdubbed. In another scene, the farmers' abandonment of their wagons to flee west is accompanied by a ludicrous chanted song about the lure of gold. Moments like this, and the stirring landscape montage and patriotic anthem that opens the film, are unavoidably cheesy and completely halt the film's pace.

Not that the pace is so carefully modulated otherwise. Rapid shifts in tone and a massive pile-up of plot elements keep the film rocketing from one thing to the next with only sporadic measured moments along the way. The film is only slightly longer than an hour and a half, and its complex narrative seems to demand much more. It only feels like an epic because so much happens, but the major events are often rushed by. Fabian's stint as a politician and subsequent election to represent the town in a statehood caucus is barely a blip in the narrative, though it represents a major turn of events, and it's a shock when, in the next scene, he talks about five weeks going by. Meanwhile, the local saloon changes ownership so many times in the course of ten minutes of screentime that it's dizzying. Farrow simply attempts to cram too much action and too many twists into a film not big enough to support them all, and as a result the uneven pacing leaves a lot to be desired.

If the film largely falters on the large scale, it's much more successful in short bursts, in individual scenes, and in Farrow's careful camerawork. Especially noteworthy is the way he handles space in two matching scenes set at Coffin's palatial hacienda. In the first, Trumbo comes to visit his adversary, and the two have a confrontational conversation, walking around the room as the camera tracks them. Finally, as they walk towards the door with Trumbo getting ready to leave, the camera pans around to catch them in a two-shot, revealing another room off to the side, with Lily standing behind a piano and watching them. Her appearance, as Coffin's fiancee and the object of a fierce love/hate relationship for Trumbo, unsettles the scene's tension and serves as the hidden anchor for the camera throughout the scene. Tucked off to the side, listening in, she's unseen until the very end and her appearance draws attention to the camera's careful movement, which is revealed to have been conspiring (with Coffin) to keep her hidden all through the preceding scene. This scene is mirrored towards the end of the film, when Trumbo and Coffin again have a confrontation in the same room, although this time it's much more violent. Lily is again off to the side in the adjoining room, unseen throughout the scene, as the camera follows the raving mad Coffin, walking around the room with a pistol and muttering to himself. His showdown with the unarmed Trumbo ends when Lily emerges from the other room and shoots Coffin from offscreen; as he falls, the camera pans over to the side, revealing her standing there, just as it had revealed her in the earlier scene.

California excels in small touches like this, in the moments at which the subtlety and dramatic weight of Farrow's direction overcomes the sweeping gestures and grandiose aesthetics of the film as a whole. The film hangs together very awkwardly, so that its individual parts are much more than the sum. Still, it's an enjoyable film that delves into the conflict between civilization and disorder, and even if its grand ambitions fail, it works quite well as a rough-and-ready B-Western.

12/19: The Philadelphia Story

George Cukor's The Philadelphia Story is an epitome of stylish wit and charm, evincing the same concern with class and life decisions as Cukor's earlier (and much superior) Cary Grant/Katharine Hepburn vehicle Holiday. Hepburn plays Tracy Lord, a society heiress with a long history as a tabloid gossip mainstay, especially in regards to her marriage to and angry divorce from Grant's C.K. Dexter Haven (a brilliant high-class name if ever there was one). The opening scene perfectly captures the antipathy between these two, in a quick and wordless evocation of the end of their marriage: Hepburn breaks Grant's golf club over her knee, and Grant palms her face and shoves her backwards, after first feigning a punch. But when Tracy plans to get remarried, to the nouveau-riche George Kittredge (John Howard), Dexter returns into her life, dragging with him a pair of gossip-rag journalists who he plans to introduce as friends of his.

From then on, the film is a game of appearances and realities, with nothing ever quite what it seems. Dexter is seemingly out for revenge by showing up at the wedding and bringing sleazy journalists with him, but he actually has more altruistic motives in mind. And the journalists, Connor (James Stewart) and Liz (Ruth Hussey), must maintain their facades while gathering information about the Lord family. Meanwhile, Tracy sees right through her ex's ruse immediately, but is forced to accept the journalists as friends anyway, due to a blackmail plot by the tabloid's editor. All this is established with perhaps too much detail, and the first 20 minutes of the film drag ponderously with exposition that brings the plot up to this point. It's only then that the first genuine sparkle appears in the film, as Tracy and her sophisticated young sister Dinah (Virginia Weidler, in one of those annoyingly precocious little kid roles) playact before the befuddled journalists, hoping to present a super-exaggerated portrait of the society lifestyle for their benefit. This scene is hilarious, and the smooth-talking, constantly quipping Hepburn quickly proves a strangely compelling counterpart for the laconic Stewart.

The duo achieves an uneasy rapport almost as soon as they're onscreen together, totally different from Hepburn's already established rapport with Grant as her ex. In Grant, Hepburn has a true onscreen equal, someone with a sharp wit to match hers and an ability to trade barbs back and forth with ease. Stewart, in his best folksy personality, can be witty too, but his conversations with Hepburn aren't so much back-and-forth as give-and-take, up-and-down, going from periods of rapid-fire exchanges to more halting moments of withdrawal and uncertainty. The difference between the two male leads and their complicated connections with Hepburn provides the film's central spark and tension. It's telling that, from the very beginning, the prospective husband George is sidelined in favor of not just one, but two other leads. He's a stuffy cipher, a man who pulled himself up from nothing to be a successful businessman, and who has now totally bought into the status and self-importance of his new class. In contrast, both the impoverished Stewart and the born-rich Grant seem much more natural, relaxed in their skins and not overly concerned with appearances or traditions.

As this précis suggests, Cukor's interest in class is complex and not at all couched in the usual simplistic terms. The Lord family is undoubtedly upper-class, and they accept their privilege with casual ease, while Connor is nearly a pauper, a struggling writer working way beneath his talent just to pay the bills. Connor is understandably resentful of the riches around him at the Lord home, but his resentment cools as he grows to know Tracy better, although their discussions still often have a tinge of class warfare about them. This is especially apparent when Tracy offers Connor the use of a country house for private writing, and he rejects her by saying that the concept of wealthy patronesses has gone out of style. Connor just wants to be his own man, even if it means struggling, and this ultimately is the film's primary message. Both Connor and Dexter are comfortable with who they are, while George and Tracy aren't — Tracy, especially, seems uncertain about what direction to go in her life, or even what kind of person she is. She's repeatedly told, sometimes in insult, sometimes with the best of intentions, that she is a cold, distant, and self-centered goddess, and only Connor seems to see the warmth and intelligence in her.

Cukor deftly juggles this introspective subtext with the romantic interest of the central love triangle (actually complicated into a hexagon by the additional points of George and Liz), and a great deal of humor. The film is at its peak in the scenes between Connor and Tracy, especially a remarkable sequence in which the two of them grow progressively drunker and drunker over the course of a night as they ramble and talk and drink. The scene is a series of back-and-forth movements and gestures, with each of them moving towards each other and then backing off; several times, in the midst of quietly phrased arguments, their faces are close enough to kiss, and then they back away again. Cukor handles this beautifully, subtly increasing the romantic tension in the scene even as the tone of the dialogue largely remains friendly and unsentimental. When they finally kiss, the music soars romantically and then jolts to a halt, as though pausing to breath, and in the silence between kisses Hepburn simply whispers, "Golly." It's a moving, hilarious, wonderful moment, a perfect movie kiss. Without resorting to typical Hollywood grandstanding or manipulation, Cukor simply evokes the emotional depth of that kiss.

The Philadelphia Story abounds in moments like this, the result of Cukor's ability to organically combine witty dialogue, emotionally complicated characters (and performances to draw them out), and the subtle use of formal elements to gently nudge the scene towards its meaning. In this film, Cukor neatly shifts between light humor, low-key drama, and intellectual ruminations on identity, purpose, and the decisions made at crucial junctures in life. The film never quite settles into any of these modes, but it never quite feels disjointed either. Its story flows organically, and best of all, it doesn't rely on stock clichés or conventions. Its complex denouement somewhat defies the logic of Hollywood endings (though it's definitely a happy one), because it arises from the characters and their actions rather than from any clever twist or sop to audience expectations. The film as a whole isn't as dazzlingly fun as Holiday, which dealt with similar themes and ideas, nor is it as rigorous in developing these ideas. But it's still a fine work, and once it gets past the speedbump of the opening 20 minutes, it's very satisfying indeed.

12/18: Lola

The final film in Fassbinder's BRD Trilogy is Lola, and it is the trilogy's lightest and most comical installment, a colorful and vibrant satire of the capitalist idea of advancing one's self. Although Lola (Barbara Sukowa), an expensive call girl, is the titular role, she steps in and out of the central space in the film, largely ceding the foreground to the two men she's manipulating and seducing: the corrupt contractor Schukert (Mario Adorf) and the seemingly incorruptible city building inspector Von Bohm (Armin Mueller-Stahl). Even when she's in the background, though, Lola is the film's heart and soul, its vivid icon of the post-war struggle for success. Lola is, like the heroines of the other two BRD films, a woman who has been kicked around by life, and responds by making herself hard and doing anything to get what she wants. In this case, what she wants is economic independence, freedom from being a piece of property bartered over by the city's upper class citizens. With this in mind, she sets her sights on the newly arrived Von Bohm, a pillar of respectability who's unaware of her lowly status.

The film's story of love, exploitation, economic scheming, and capitalist corruption is, in its narrative details, almost entirely realistic. And yet Fassbinder makes this story seem like a dazzling fairy tale by bathing the film in gorgeous, multi-colored lights and fragmenting the narrative with dramatic ellipses, fading to an abstract smear of colors in between scenes. One can't possibly talk enough about Fassbinder's use of color in this film. Color was always an integral component in his films, especially in the ones he made following his first exposure to Douglas Sirk, but this is the epitome of Fassbinder's approach to color and light. He arranges a dazzling array of pinks, reds, blues, and greens, making almost every scene a fabulous composition in color first, and anything else only secondarily.

But Fassbinder's use of color is hardly just ornamental, and he makes good use of his bright palette in developing his characters and their worlds. From the very first shot of the film, Lola is associated with the color red, and in most scenes where she appears, she's bathed in red light. Von Bohm, on the other hand, is associated with blue, most clearly in the bright blue of his eyes, which Fassbinder consistently accentuates. Von Bohm's face is often shrouded in darkness, with only a light tightly focused on the area around his eyes, so that they glow and glisten with an ethereal blue light. This tension between the red of passion and Von Bohm's cool blue is finally released when the pair drive home together and then talk outside the car afterwards. Throughout this conversation, Von Bohm's side of the car is filled with blue light, and Lola's side with a soft pink, without rational explanation — Fassbinder lights the film not in terms of realistic light sources, but with the metaphorical logic of dreams, and every nuance of lighting has a meaning. It's telling, then, that when Von Bohm comes closer to Lola to kiss her, he's moving out of the safe blue aura that has surrounded him throughout the film and into the bright red of Lola's world. When they kiss, both of them are illuminated in red. In the scenes after this point, following Lola's rejection of Von Bohm and his subsequent discovery that she's a whore, Fassbinder no longer calls attention to Mueller-Stahl's shining eyes, eliminating the blue aura of respectability that has protected him. Lola's appeal has drawn him away from his orderly world, whether he realizes it or not, and everything that happens to him afterward will be subject to her desires.

The film's stylishness and glamor elevate this otherwise down-to-earth tale into a capitalist fable, a breezily executed metaphor for Germany's "Economic Miracle" and the dehumanizing toll on a society that has begun to place economics before life and happiness. Several characters in the film speak about the distinction between public life and private life, but the film itself is essentially chronicling the suppression and destruction of the private sphere in favor of the public. Lola, certainly, has no private life of her own: her sexuality consists of business transactions, and even her grasping at genuine love with Von Bohm quickly morphs into a cycle of exploitation and manipulation in order to achieve monetary success and security. The film suggests a society in which people's private selves have disappeared, and all that's left is the shallow, money-focused exterior they present as a public face. With capitalism, Fassbinder seems to be saying, there really isn't much more than what meets the eye. There are only occasional and ineffective pockets of resistance to this capitalist barrage, especially in the form of the socialist Esslin (Matthias Fuchs) and, briefly, the jilted Von Bohm, before Lola's seductive charm sets him back on the course of the capitalist lock-step. Even the principled Esslin, a disciple of Bakunin, can eventually be bought out for the right price.

This film is Fassbinder at his witty, delirious best, deftly blending political satire and overwrought melodrama, with a stunning set of performances from some lesser-known lights in the director's stock company. Sukowa, especially, is a revelation in the only starring role Fassbinder gave her; she tears into a juicy performance as the cold but sexy Lola. Her character ranges from woozy sentimentality to joyous singing on stage at the whorehouse to icy manipulation, and in the scene where Von Bohm sees her at the brothel, she breaks into a jaw-dropping striptease, throwing her anguish at her lover's discovery into every violently jerky movement and crack in her voice. Mario Adorf is equally notable in his only role for Fassbinder, burning up the screen as the sleazy but undeniably vibrant contractor Schukert, his energy swallowing up everything around him. It goes without saying that Mueller-Stahl is exceptional as Von Bohm, exuding exactly the quiet strength that the character requires, and stalwart Fassbinder bit player Hark Bohm is cagey and opaque as the city's corrupt mayor.

This is a typically complex film from Fassbinder, in which politics and personal conflicts are inextricably wed together, making "the personal is political" much more than a shallow catch-phrase. The film both opens and closes with a black and white photo of Konrad Adenauer, the post-war first Chancellor of West Germany, and in between is a whole world of private and public dramas happening under the auspices of his administration. For Fassbinder, this is the only way to look at the world, as a web of interpersonal connections interwoven with the necessities of politics and economics, and Lola is a glorious farce that unravels some of these threads.