When its theme of the artist's responsibility to society doesn't get in the way of its Forties décors and narrative conventions, this Third Reich period piece is possibly an orgy of giggles and squeals, sighs and sniffs for the Fassbinder flock. The quite lavishly scaled-up production, closer to a Fox film of the Forties than a typical Fassbinder, perhaps means more tracking shots, more dresses and hats, more floral bouquets and potted palms, more mirrors and lamps -- but who's counting? Fassbinder here seems more willing than ever to be the artistic fence-straddler, appealing both to his loyal coterie and to the vast public as yet unconverted. His strategy is that slippery style of quasi- or semi-parody where every lapse into vulgarity or sentimentality, every overemphatic zoom shot or flurry of violins, can be explained away as the legacy of pop/mass/Hollywood culture. And if some newcomer to Fassbinder should wander in unawares and take the whole thing straight, someone who won't even be able to recognize Fassbinder when The Man Himself shows up in a leather coat and blind-man's specs as a shadowy hero of the Jewish underground -- well, that's all right too. Fassbinder has laid down the classic hedged bet of the Leftist artist. His appropriation of pop-culture mannerisms can be seen on the one hand as an attempt to satirize the mindless and mind-warping sentimentalities of bourgeois art forms, and on the other hand as an attempt to discard the elitist tag of the European "art film," to inject some plebeian vitality and plain-talk into the stuff, to embrace democratically the broadest possible audience, etc., etc. With Hanna Schygulla and Giancarlo Giannini. (1981) — Duncan Shepherd
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