Patrick McElroy on Fassbinder's LOLA and its parallels to 40's & 50's American Cinema
“I let the audience feel and think.” Those are the words said by the late German filmmaker Rainer Werner Fassbinder, who was coming out of an age in European film where intellectualism was the driving point for many filmmakers, but Fassbinder was a rebel taking inspiration from classic Hollywood, creating an emotional experience, but also giving an intellectual touch. Rarely in any of his body of work is this more evident than in his 1981 masterpiece Lola, which was released 40 years ago this month. The film was the third in the BRD Trilogy, which was released out of chronological order, the first was The Marriage of Maria Braun (1979), and the second was Veronika Voss (1982). The films are connected not through narrative, but through theme, each one focuses on a woman, each of a different social class, in the post WWII German society.
The film takes place in the town of Coburg Germany in 1957, where like much of the country reconstruction is taking place. The major brothel and nightclub in the town is owned by one of the property developers Schuckert (Mario Adorf), who has a lustful relationship with one of its star singers Lola (Barbara Sukowa). The figures in town are then threatened when the new building commissioner von Bohm (Armin Mueller-Stahl) arrives, who in contrast to Schuckert is a moral person. Von Bohm upon arriving, hires a housekeeper who also happens to be Lola’s mother, he then meets Lola not knowing of her work at the brothel, and begins to fall in love with her, so now she’s caught in a love triangle of two men who represent different ideals.
The film’s plot was inspired by Josef Von Sternberg’s 1930 masterpiece The Blue Angel, but Fassbinder has a greater understanding of women, and creates a character who’s torn by a man that provides for her, and a man that loves her for who she is. This would mark the third time that Fassbinder would work with cinematographer Xaver Schwarzenberger, and the films he screened for him in preparation for it were Johnny Guitar (1954), The Barefoot Contessa (1954) and Written on the Wind (1956).
He wanted the film to have the vibrant candy colored look of 1950s technicolor, where it brings a heightened sense of reality to the emotion of melodrama. Fassbinder was iconoclastic in his time, because many filmmakers were going for realism, but he wanted to create a world of artifice for his audiences to escape into. When watching Fassbinder’s films half a century later, it’s still amazing to see how in such a short amount of time, someone could create a body of work as diverse, and as distinct as his.
Patrick McElroy is a movie writer and movie lover based in Los Angeles. Check out his other writing at: https://www.facebook.com/patrick.mcelroy.3726 or his IG: @mcelroy.patrick