Fassbinder's Veronica Voss

I saw a few interesting movies this weekend. The first one was Veronica Voss, the penultimate film by the German filmmaker Fassbinder, shown as a part of the ongoing retrospective of his films at the Siskel film center. The film is about an aging, once popular and now out of work film actress, who is addicted to drugs and alcohol to the point of self-destruction, and who falls into the clutches of a sadistic and villainous woman neurologist. A sports reporter falls for her mysterious charms and tries to save her but, as it always happens in Fassbinder-land, the story ends in inevitable, fatalistic tragedy.

What is so remarkable about this film, and which may apply to almost all of his other films, is how diametrically opposite the effects of this film are to the Hollywood melodramas that it seems to resemble and is apparently influenced by. Unlike traditional melodramas, this film doesn't engage our nicer emotions (of love, human bonding, selflessness) but actually turns them off. And in so doing it doesn't offer any easy outlets and cathartic moments and so the viewer is saved (is that the right word?) from the lazy, feel good sentimentalities of normal weepie films. It's almost as if Fassbinder felt that any traditional emotional response to the subject and themes of the film would soften the true-horrors of the everyday brutality that these characters have to go through and also muddy the waters and withhold the real truth. The more intellectual the viewer response is, the purer it is. I think this works very well with intellectual filmmakers who are interested in big themes and ideas (Bunuel and Bergman come to mind) but in case of Fassbinder, this becomes a little difficult specially in the beginning. Because Fassbinder is not much interested in big ideas and themes. Although his films are very political in nature, his subjects are actually emotions and feelings of human beings and how we all use and abuse those feelings and emotions.

Fassbinder also seems to believe that Veronika's tragedy was, as I pointed out earlier, inevitable; that she was doomed to a quest for eternal youth, for praise and adulation and a never-ending party (aren't we all are?). Drugs were just the way she continued the quest long after it had become a self-deception. Fassbinder's Veronica Voss is a bleak and sometimes savage addition to his oeuvre of similarly remarkable films but did he realize that he himself was one of the characters of his stories (he died of a similar self-destructive addiction)? This movie makes you wonder.