Fassbinder’s recent entry in the Netflix roster – with two films, so far: Lola (1981) and Veronika Voss (1982) – is a paradox, given the grandmaster’s appetite for incorrectness: it is indeed hard to imagine how it is possible that these titles, in all their expansive irreverence, are able to coexist with the new, conformist works of contemporary auteur cinema. But, well, passons: because the films are here, now, just a click away, and any new dive into the midst of the sophisticated neons in Lola or, conversely, the sumptuous black and white images of Veronika Voss holds the promise of a newly sharpened gaze, one particular to a meteoric enfant terrible, the same kind that the German filmmaker was. 

Lola is one of Fassbinder’s second-rate films. The plaster colors that sculpt the shape of Barbara Sukowa’s body as it sways underneath the famished gazes of the men visiting her cabaret are like a pale croquis of the chromatic explosion in Querelle, the filmmaker’s last. And the whole sticky mess that is orchestrated by the script seems to lack the emotional heights of one In einem Jahr mit 13 Monden. Even in contrast with the “sisters” in its trilogy, the above-mentioned Veronika Voss and Die Ehe der Maria Braun, it seems that Lola is something of an unloved child, who still strives to get the highest grades in school. I’m not saying anything controversial by mentioning that the apparent smoothness of the film is, in contrast to all of the safe strokes that are invading cinemas nowadays, an emotional torrent that seeks to envelop us. These women’s propensity for voluptuously suffering with tears streaming down their faces, as they bask in the unnatural light of a reflector, just as the “ironic compassion” (as per critic Jonathan Rosenbaum) for the men who are run down through the cutting board of love, is modeled against the historical backbone of a nation that has just exited a ruthless war. Thusly, Fassbinder completes his much-dreamed-about tapestry of a narration on Germany’s past, reinforced with various electrifying sexual undercurrents.

One leaves Lola behind feeling the noxious aftertaste of a boulevard-esque comedy, in which little human egos run their heads against the grandiose weave of feeling, but their clash is only capable of eliciting pity and embarrassment. Besides, the film has something of the familiar air of a theater troupe that is forced to act in a cheap play: as per usual, the rarefied atmosphere of art and the stuffiness of popular culture blend together in Fassbinder’s vision with a demented organicity, up to the point in which they become indistinguishable – its hard to say, if not even outright impossible, what comes from Sirk and what comes from the cusp of pornography what comes from his love of the working class and what comes from historical representation. It’s an important lesson of this cinema which, in its ordered disorder, knew how to amplify its emotion, to discover its optimal temperature in order to distill it, and thus guide it towards excess – and, from this state of overflow, to turn its face towards us while holding a bouquet of conclusions, gifted from the depths of the uncondescending affection that invested Fassbinder with his tragic grandiosity. It’s exactly this generosity of the creative gesture, which fully launches itself into  the conflictual terrain of pathos – a Fassbinder character is akin to a fountain which, in its sputtering sprays, crystallizes a deeper truth –, should turn the filmmaker into a mercurial figure of these increasingly emotionally stunted times.  

Lola is not Petra von Kant, nor is she Lili Marleen: her importance is much rather guessed through the reflection that she shines onto the attitude of the other characters, a handful of various men that are all united by their weakness for the same feminine figure. Be it the virtuous chief of the Urbanism Commission of this small Bavarian town (Armin Mueller-Stahl), an old school guy who is hell-bent on creating order within the corruptible fauna of the cabaret, or the burly pimp (Mario Adorf) that takes care of the local brothel – a veritable commercial center –, all their knees turn soft whenever they set their eyes in Lola. Fassbinder makes an interesting move: since, as stereotypical these male characters may be, with their clearly-defined tasks, as if they were stolen from a John Ford western, as ineffable the woman’s construction is, from the script’s point of view. I wonder if it’s just a coincidence that I’ve mostly forgotten what Lola’s actions in the film are – except for her existentialist lapdance , from one lap to the other –, but I can still precisely conjure the gestures of von Bohm’s secretary, the distinguished bureaucrat whose downfall is touching to the same degree that it is hilarious.

Lola manages by opportunistically miming her love left and right, while von Bohm, a noble heart cloaked in commissioner clothes, falls for an easy woman and his ideals of anti-corruption. The film’s cynicism, almost always counterbalanced by the candor of its gaze, which doubtlessly allies itself with the losers, glazes over the small, almost theatrical world that Fassbinder draws in quick strokes, from just a few broad strokes of his camera. It’s an ambivalent attitude that determined Rosenbaum to identify a sort of defeatism that is present in Fassbinder’s works, as he is incapable of proposing a new world that would exist against the heady, rotten one that he is shooting. But things are much more complex than how Rosenbaum sees them, since if we were to lend him credence, it would mean that a progressive view can only be born in the midst of a pure, hard-core ideological discourse. And such a spiky worldview would be the least imaginable one for Fassbinder: on the contrary, the politics lie precisely in the ineffable pains of his characters, in his incursions within the worlds of eccentric lumpen-proletarians, in the scraps of poetry that he includes in his bookish transitions. Lola, as so many other films by Fassbinder, is one that decisively embraces the richness of meaning, allowing itself to sway to the ebbing of an innocent gaze wandering amongst hoards of cynics, a fact which one must undoubtedly call authenticity. And it seems to be something that died along with this inexhaustible filmmaker.

Victor Morozov

Film critic and journalist; writes regularly for Dilema Veche and Scena9. Doing a MA film theory programme in Paris.