Mother Kusters Goes to Heaven

The Gene Siskel Film Center, here in Chicago, is holding a retrospective of films by German filmmaker Fassbinder. Yesterday I managed to catch the screening of one of his best known and perhaps most overtly political film Mother Kusters Goes to Heaven. I have been a long admirer of Fassbinder ever since I chanced upon his films without knowing who he was a couple of years back at a similar retrospective at the Max Mueller Bhavan in Bangalore. The first thing that struck me after watching his films was the keen eye and deep sensitivity that he had for all kinds of human selfishness, hypocrisy, manipulation and emotional brutality and the way he subjected all modern human institutions like love, family, marriage, society, politics etc. to question. What was also remarkable in his films was his honest true-to-life portrayals of victims and victimizers and perhaps his stark and despairing claim that the two needn't be different persons.

One of the persistent themes that interested Fassbinder, and which is present in Mother Kusters too, was that the fear of being left alone is the most important driver of our emotional life. It is this fear that forces us to depend on other people and which in turn, at least in the Fassbinder-land, invariably leads to oppression and exploitation of one human being by the other. He also explains and critiques the institutions of romantic love, marriage, family, society and politics in this framework. Some of his best films explore this idea very eloquently. In The Merchant of Four Seasons, an insecure, cuckolded fruit peddler who is forsaken by his family and his girl friend (apparently because he became a fruit peddler shaming their sense of bourgeois propriety) slowly discovers his own uselessness and drinks himself to death. In his other masterpiece The Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant, the titular character, an alcoholic lesbian, isolates herself in her room and lives on the floor with a bottle of alcohol after being rejected by her lover. In Ali -- Fear Eats the Soul a Moroccan immigrant, desperately lonely, marries a cleaning woman twenty-five years older than he is, and then collapses of an ulcer after being subjected to ridicule by the bourgeois society. As it appears, these films are not the kind of films you can take your girl friend to and have a nice time, rather these films are like cold slaps on the face and waking call to the senses and intellect which make yourself alive to the everyday brutality we all either face or subject others to.

Coming to Mother Kusters, like all films which are genuinely complex, the plot is very simple. Hermann Kusters, a factory worker, murders the son of his supervisor before taking his own life. As we learn later, he was disturbed by the news of the mass lay-offs that the company was going to make. After this event the media blitz descends on the poor mother Kusters like vultures to feed on her feelings and emotions. After a reporter, who manages to get close to the mother by faking real sympathy, publishes a sensationalist article branding the dead man as "the factory murderer", the name of Kusters is ruined is for ever. The daughter, who is a singer in a seedy club, decides to use the publicity to give life to her moribund career and she moves in with the reporter who originally wrote the article. The son is shown to be too passive and this event sours the already stormy relationship old mother had with her pesky and irritable daughter-in-law. Feeling desolate and lonely she meets an armchair communist couple, who decide to use her for their own narrow political goals by enlisting her in their communist party and when she gets disillusioned with the party politics and joins hands with a bunch of dilettante and immature anarchists, they think of taking extreme action.

I think what I liked most about the film and what makes it different form other Fassbinder films is the overtness and directness with which it goes along in its aim of doing social criticism of issues like urban alienation, sensationalist journalism, exploitation and futility of politics without forsaking honest portrayals of psychologically complex characters and relationships and so without any hint of didacticism. Also, Fassbinder dispenses with his usual cold cynicism in the end by making mother Kusters accept the dinner invitation of an equally lonely widower watchman after the anarchists leave her alone in the hunger strike, that originally they had inveigled her to participate in. In the process of all the trials and tribulations, Fassbinder seems to suggest, Mother Kusters has achieved personal and political enlightenment and matured her class instincts and may be perhaps even hinting at a possibility of a genuine solidarity of victims and exploited in future. Actually originally the film was supposed to end in a different way (which was shown in the screening too). The anarchists, in the original screenplay, immature and stupid as they are, take hostage of the editor and ask him for retracting the article about the dead Kusters and freeing all political prisoners in Germany. The film ends with a freeze frame of Mother Kusters face with subtitles informing us that Police reached the venue in time and everybody was killed including Mother Kusters (that's the clue to the title). But I think Fassbinder very wisely decided to change the ending. This new ending is more honest in emotional terms and gave the whole film a human complexity that would have not been possible with the brutally ironic "intellectual" ending that Fassbinder had planned for earlier.

Overall, I found Mother Kusters to be an extremely stimulating film, intellectually and emotionally, and rich in thematic and aesthetic complexity. I cannot recommend it highly enough.