Lili Marleen

Fassbinder was never a director to be pigeon-holed and his restless formal experimentation resulted in a highly chequered body of work. Lili Marleen is one of his less satisfying films, with much ambition but a feeling that it was too rushed to be successful (he managed to release another 4 films before he died a year later of a heroin overdose).

An English/German co-production with dubbed English dialogue and an evidently substantial budget it was based on Lale Andersen's novel The Sky Has Many Colours and tells the story of the famous song that gives the film its title. Its history is intertwined with the romance between a German-Aryan Zurich cabaret singer named Willie (Hanna Schygulla) who made it famous and a Swiss Jewish composer, Robert Mendelsson (Giancarlo Giannini), whose father David (Mel Ferrer) is a wealthy businessman engaged in helping Jews flee Germany and the burgeoning National Socialist phenomenon.

On one level it is a historical romance with all the appropriate production values but Fassbinder typically undercuts this seriousness with hyperbolic melodrama and full-on Nazi kitsch. This is not in itself a problem but it is done quite crudely with the same flaring chords and zooming camerawork repeated at every turn of events. That and the fact that we are subjected to Willie singing the same song over and over (it actually is used to torture Robert and we know by then how effective it is in that respect) and the film gradually becomes less and less bearable as it lurches between the sublime and the ridiculous.

The two halves of the film work against each other and any sense of meaning that Fassbinder might have had is lost, the closing scene of Robert conducting Mahler with Willi fluttering in some kind of erotic afflatus being more risible than either redemptive or parodic. If this is what Fassbinder wanted then he was successful, but who can tell?

DVD Extras: Audio commentary by Dr. Roger Hillman, Associate Professor in Film Studies/German studies at the Australian National University, Canberra; Hanna Schygulla On Lili Marleen; Original Theatrical trailer. NB : the original German theatrical release had a running time of 120m.

Available from: Madman

 

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