Fassbinder’s Cynical ‘Marriage’ of Inconvenience

Maria Braun doesn’t start out cynical. The heroine of “The Marriage of Maria Braun” is innocent and hopeful as Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s 1978 movie opens--Hitler’s war may be collapsing all around her, but she’s swaddled in the dreams of a newlywed.

The optimism is fleeting. The day after her wedding, husband Hermann is sent to the front; Maria’s honeymoon finds her visiting the train station daily looking for him among the wounded soldiers coming home. She wears a sign on her back, asking if anyone knows anything about him.

Then the occupation begins. Postwar Germany is a ruin, overrun by American soldiers. There’s little food, no firewood and only the barest of money. Maria starts to turn hard, an opportunist trying to survive. She’ll do just about anything to get ahead, and Fassbinder uses her as a symbol for a Germany trying to revive itself.

“The Marriage of Maria Braun,” screening Friday night as the latest installment in UC Irvine’s “Off the Beaten Path” series, is an often unforgiving portrait of the time. Fassbinder, one of Germany’s most political filmmakers during the ‘60s and ‘70s, is inclined to criticize, to judge. He recalls an era of insecurity, and comes up with a frowning assessment.

That’s just Fassbinder’s way. One of the more pessimistic directors of his generation, he saw himself as a realist with not much to smile about. Fassbinder usually saw injustice and self-deception under the brightest of life’s surfaces. His own end in 1982 reflected this tragic point of view. Fassbinder was found slumped over his editing table, a cigarette wedged between his fingers, apparently the victim of a drug overdose.

Maria, despite all her success, is also a tragic figure. Her character is complicated, contradictory and often confusing (too much ambiguity is a recurring flaw in Fassbinder’s work), but it’s obvious that the director looks down on what she’s become.

Although Maria sets her own course (mostly an amoral one, going from one man to the next without thought of the consequences for them or her husband) and becomes prosperous during a time when it was difficult for anybody, especially a woman, to get ahead, we feel she’s sacrificed too much for her triumphs.

The film, which won the Oscar for best foreign film, is interesting if only for the depth of Maria’s cynicism. Also, her strange allegiance to Hermann (Klaus Lowitsch), even as he tries to understand why she claims love for him while satisfying her own sexual impulses elsewhere.

There’s a dispassionate, denuded quality to her couplings (and to the critical moments at the movie’s end when she’s reunited with Hermann) that speak forcefully about her barren nature and that of the life barely moving around her.

As Fassbinder’s metaphor for a soulless Germany, Hanna Schygulla is well-suited for the role. Although pretty and sensual, there’s nothing carnal about her; she’s almost an automaton in her calculated, selfish way of approaching things.

But despite this, we don’t despise Maria. Schygulla evokes a trace of sympathy because we understand how limited her choices are. And at least Maria doesn’t make excuses for the path she’s chosen or what she’s become. There’s courage in that, no matter how perverse.

Who: Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s “The Marriage of Maria Braun.”

When: Friday, May 27, at 7 and 9 p.m.

Where: The UC Irvine Student Center Crystal Cove Auditorium.

Whereabouts: Take the San Diego (405) Freeway to Jamboree Road and head south to Campus Drive and take a left. Turn right on Bridge Road and take it into the campus.

Wherewithal: $2 to $4.

Where to call: (714) 856-6379.