THE STATIONMASTER’S WIFE (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1977)

In Bavaria in the late 1920s, Xaver Ferdinand Maria Bolwieser (Kurt Raab, pitch-perfect), railroad stationmaster and Nazi Party member, finds himself miserably married to Hanni once he learns of her (it turns out, serial) adultery. Tried and sentenced for perjury he had committed for Hanni’s benefit at her trial for adultery with the local butcher, Bolwieser explodes with misogynism. Hanni has “ruined” him, he insists. But, as with Professor Immanuel Rath vis-à-vis Lola-Lola in The Blue Angel (Josef von Sternberg, 1930), Bolwieser’s misogynism may not have been caused by Hanni’s behavior; rather, it may be what drew him to Hanni in the first place. Bolwieser, after all, contributed the masochism to their sadomasochistic marital relationship.
     Ninety minutes shorter than his 3⅓-hour version for West German television, Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s adaptation of Oskar Maria Graf’s 1931 novel Bolwieser revolves around this marriage, finding in one partner’s cold cruelty, and the other’s subservience and self-pity, promptings for both Nazism and growing public acceptance of it. Hitler’s lunatic party exploited Germany’s economic woes and decimated prestige as a result of its First World War defeat.
     Largely, it is one of Fassbinder’s slackest films. However, it is not without interest. The screeching of the caged pet in their home—a cockatoo, I believe—parodies the Bolwiesers and projects a sense of Germany’s distress. Shots of the couple, or of one or the other, through windows and in mirrors suggest life, obstructed and distorted, at a remove from its own existence: another index of the national mood and personality. Considerable darkness points to Germany’s postwar humiliation and the far more traumatic period Germany was entering. Silken camera movements are shredded by sculpted compositions: shots of the couple, one person behind the other, each facing in a different direction.

FROWNLAND (Ronald Bronstein, 2007)

In his twenties, Keith (Dore Mann, terrific) is a marginally functioning chap in Brooklyn, who, once he gets started, talks nonstop but not fluently; it is with great difficulty, in fact, that he gets his words out, with knots of “You know”’s punctuating the blockage. Verbally, then, Keith is, at once, constipated and torrentially filling the toilet bowl of his existence.
     Frownland, independent writer-director Ronald Bronstein’s outstanding first feature (best film, Gotham Awards) claims a dazzlingly brilliant narrative structure. An angled shot of movie-action on a television screen, followed by a pan to the viewer, Keith, establishes a paradoxical mode: an outside-of-oneself subjectivity that prefigures Keith’s mental problems and largely disintegrated ego. Keith lives, including sleeps, in the kitchen of the apartment he shares with someone else, who occupies the one bedroom but who, out of work, pays none of the rent or utilities. To his messy, cramped quarters Keith brings Laura, who seems even more lost than he; she plops on his bed, facing the wall it is up against, and stabs Keith with a push-pin to curb his desire for sex. At this point, the film seems to be as much about her as about him, but what about her we aren’t sure. We glean a raging masochism in Laura when, allergic to down, she rubs her face into Keith’s down pillows.
     Indeed, for a film largely about Keith, Bronstein is adept at shifting the focus to other characters. When Keith, using his white socks, regales Laura with a puppet-show recounting his day at work, we see this attempted bit of entertainment from Laura’s point of view. Later, when Keith makes one of his desperate phone calls to Sandy, whom Keith mistakes for a friend but who is really fed up with Keith, Bronstein shifts the focus to Sandy by confining the camera to Sandy’s flat. Later still, Bronstein shifts from the resumed focus on Keith—the interior space occupying him in the exterior space he occupies—to follow apartment-mate Charles’s test-taking in pursuit of a job. But matters always return to Keith, and the film (somewhat too easily) ends with him. What is accomplished by this unfamiliar narrative structure? We better grasp the burden of Keith’s existence by glimpsing the exhausting burden he places on others. In effect, we see what Keith himself cannot see of his own life.
     Keith’s job is also strange. Keith solicits money for a charity that is at least ostensibly involved with multiple sclerosis. As thoughts of Federico Fellini’s great The Swindle (Il Bidone, 1955), as well as David and Albert Maysles’, and Charlotte Zwerin’s, Salesman (1969), swim in and out of our heads, we watch Keith go door-to-door, trying hard to sell scripts of coupons. He tells people that his own brother has multiple sclerosis, that if they buy a script of coupons they will be helping his brother and others like him, and we wonder whether this is true or simply part of a script he has been given and is reciting. We glean the possibility of such deceit from the shady nature of Keith’s boss, Carmine, Carmine’s sadistic treatment of Keith, which reeks of exploitation (from which we may as easily infer that Keith, sincere, is being duped), the Fellini film about con artists masquerading as Catholic clergy, and one thing more: Keith’s own cynical suspiciousness, which crops up when he confronts Charles about their unpaid electric bill. (Charles insists he will pay it—and doesn’t.) In other words, we ourselves have been drawn into Keith’s existence; we are seeing him, at least in part, as he sees Charles.
     Energetic, painfully funny, Frownland is a remarkable piece of work; and Keith, who is as endearing as he is maddeningly irritating, is a remarkable character. He reminds me of Per Oscarsson’s Pontus—perhaps cinema’s greatest performance—in Hunger (Sult, Henning Carlsen, 1966): novelist Knut Hamsun’s writer who is starving for acknowledgement as well as food, and whose mind is shot because he doesn’t get it.