Excellent, smart action film.

brilliant actors, brilliant editing

A Disappointing Continuation

The tone of this movie is interesting -- the stakes are both dramatic and high, but it's balanced with a lot of fun, tongue and cheek dialogue.

BERLIN ALEXANDERPLATZ is the stuff of legend. It was unavailable(until recently), mythical(and still is) and talked about with awe and mystery(and will continue to do so). It is adapted from a modern German classic by Alfred Doblin(a close friend of Bertolt Brecht) and it is set in the decade of the peak of German Modernism, a modernism that was irrevocably separated from the post-war Germany by 15 years of war and slaughter. The one single attempt by the greatest artist of post-war Germany to bridge the gap was a 15hour film, divided into 13 chapters and one epilogue, broadcast on television but crafted and composed with the most beautiful, most refined, most political language that cinema is capable of. BERLIN ALEXANDERPLATZ is a real thing of beauty on the small screen but on the big cinema it would be something else, a prodigal son returning to his father's welcoming arms.Fassbinder claimed that Alfred Doblin wasn't especially interested in the Alexanderplatz(Berlin's key commercial district which lapsed to East Germany in the Cold War), the lives on the street came through the descriptions of the refuges in which the character's lived. The 14 episodes are minutely detailed observations and recreations of places - apartments, bars, offices, restaurants.Franz Biberkopf(Gunther Lamprecht) is the most tormented character in film history since Chaplin's Tramp or even Vivien Leigh's Blanche DuBois, he is punished by society and worse he punishes himself abjectly. The spectacle of misery and horror is given tender beauty and rare generosity by the director and the actor. People still laugh, they still tell jokes, they still have sex and they have their beer and schnapps but each person he meets will point their thumbs down the road to death. Some do it by direct cruelty, others do it by the equally subtle cruelty of friendship and love. Fassbinder said that love is the most insidious form of social repression, yet he also longed for the unconditional love that human beings are capable of, even if in his world this love leads to death and madness. This longing is clear in the touching performance of Barbara Sukowa's Mieze, who is dressed up as a ballerina yet is realistically attuned with her status as a prostitute and of Franz's status as her pimp. It also manifests itself in the perplexing relationship between Franz and Reinhold(Gottfried John), two doubles who from their very first sight are drawn to each other and bound in soul though never in body. When Mieze enters the story, the triangle is complete and the stage is set for the apocalyptic finish.This isn't a lot of plot for a 15hour film yet watching the film one can't say that that the film is too long. This is an epic film, a film that has to be lived in, to understand the characters. We have to feel the apartment and sad corridors. We have to feel these refuges as tactile presences if we are to understand the world of these characters - the Germany of the late 20s which is well on its way to the collective hysteria that installed Hitler and his gang in office and plunged the world into the most cataclysmic event of the last 100 years. This Germany of the 20s was of course shown in films like DOKTOR MABUSE, PANDORA'S BOX and of course in the key reference for Fassbinder, Murnau's DER LETZTE MANN. Fassbinder summons up the feel of the 20s despite limited sets and a tight schedule. One feels the despair and hysterical fury which is implied in those films but brought out into the open in this film.Fassbinder encompasses diverse, eclectic visual styles, for this film he limits himself to the naturalistic approach he displayed in earlier films like EFFI BRIEST or ALI, the exception is an alley of brothels in Episode 7 which has the artificiality of a Brecht production and of course the famous epilogue. Structurally, the early episodes of BERLIN ALEXANDERPLATZ(up to Episode 6 when Franz loses his arm) play as single pieces while the later episodes work better when seen end-to-end. The final four hours of Alexanderplatz(Episodes 13, 14 and Epilogue) add up to a single whole. As a standalone piece the best part is Episode 4(A Handful of People in the Depths of Silence - A perfect subtitle for the film) where the tender warmth and compassion between Franz and Baumann(Gerhard Zwerenz) as well as the lyrical and poetic narrative employed in that episode(anticipating Franz's breakdown in the epilogue) creates the effect of a powerful music piece.The joy of BERLIN ALEXANDERPLATZ, and I use joy without irony in talking of this sad and unhappy story, comes from the mere presence of the actors, all of them players in Fassbinder's stock company(the finest repertory since the death of John Ford) show up in this film. We see Gunther Lamprecht at first, a bit player in previous films given the role of a lifetime here, we see Brigitte Mira as the non-judgmental Frau Bast, a role written for her. Then there are the ladies, a honour roll that encompasses Hanna Schygulla(in one of her best performances), Karin Baal, Barbara Sukowa, a one scene cameo by Irm Hermann and finally just when you thought someone is missing in flies Margit Carstensen as an angel clad in golden tights in the Epilogue. Among the men, we have Gunther Kauffmann, Volker Spengler, Gottfried John(whose intense schemers in the early films seem to have fused into making Reinhold Hoffmann the most scary presence in German Cinema since Murnau's NOSFERATU) and Fassbinder's friend the novelist Gerhard Zwerenz who plays the small but unforgettable role of Baumann.Above them is Rainer Werner Fassbinder(who appears with his angels in a one-shot cameo in the epilogue) whose vision achieves a clarity and a vitality bearing the weight of an artist at the height of his powers.

The most unique contribution of film director Rainer Werner Fassbinder to Alfred Döblin's novel "Berlin Alexanderplatz. The story of Franz Biberkopf" (1929) was his interpretation of the relationship between Franz Biberkopf and Reinhold as a love story. Therefore, in Fassbinder's interpretation, Franz Biberkopf's accident is seen as self-mutilation. In Fassbinder's last movie, Querelle (1982), we will hear the confession: "To kiss a man is like the confrontation with one's own face in the mirror". As different as Döblin's "Alexanderplatz" and Genet's "Querelle" may be, the two novels are alike because they meet one another like an object and its mirror image: the first novel deals with the good-guy Franz Biberkopf who is ruined by his love to humankind, and the other novel with the immoral murderer Querelle by which those who love him, perish.Like many of Fassbinder's movies, "Berlin Alexanderplatz", too, shows clear autobiographical traces. Fassbinder said about the three protagonists Franz, Reinhold and Mieze: "All three together supply my chance to survive". As Fassbinder pointed out in his article "The cities of the human and his soul", unlike Döblin in his original novel, Fassbinder is not so much interested in the discovery of the outer reality of Berlin, but concentrates on their inhabitants. "Berlin Alexanderplatz" is a journey into the souls of different people under the conviction that the reign of subjectivity of the inner realities is much bigger than the reign of the objective reality outside. As a matter of fact (as has been pointed out by several commentators), "Berlin Alexanderplatz" with its almost 100 roles gave Fassbinder the possibility to let appear in his movie practically every person who had been crucial in his own life. That he split himself over three persons (Franz, Reinhold, Mieze) is very typical in Fassbinder's work in which many persons have their Alter Egos (e.g., "Despair", 1977). As Fassbinder had pointed out in an interview: "Despair is the only condition of life that I can accept". Consistently, the movie shows the systematic destruction of Franz, since "he is an anarchical figure in a crowd of social beings, and in the end, he perishes because of that". In fifteen and half an hour, we can analyze "the constellations, how a human spoils his life by a certain incapability which he developed by his upbringing" (Fassbinder). The movie shows the shaping of Franz Biberkopf to a mentally destroyed but therefore useful member of society. Every connoisseur of Fassbinder's work will be remembered to the final scene of "Fear of Fear" (1975) in which Margot, after having been "cured" in a psychiatric clinic, types addresses on envelopes like a trained monkey. When Karli brings her the information that their neighbor, the depressive Mr. Bauer, has killed himself, she hardly recognizes this fact anymore telling to Karli that she is feeling fine.

Nothing can be more melodramatic than German melodrama, particularly that of the beginning of the 20th century. Franz Biberkopf's story is such a deep, thick and sickening melodrama and Fassbinder makes it so dense, so heavy that we are totally overwhelmed by this hardening cast-plaster, a melodrama contained between Biberkopf's release from the prison where he has spent four years for killing his girlfriend, Ida, to the end of his life as a concierge in some factory after the trial in which he is a witness against the accused, his friend Reinhold who had assassinated Franz's last girl friend Mieze, after he was released from the mental institution to which he had been committed after the crime. Biberkopf is the perfect victim who is ready to do anything he is asked to do by the people he considers his friends at the moment of the request. He is totally dependent on women and at the same time reveals he is very particular about them and actually loves only very few. Eva of course, his permanent love who lives with a rich Herbert and carries his child for a few months. Ida, who he killed out of rage one morning. And Wieze who will be killed by Reinhold. The second characteristic of Franz Biberkopf is that he has the brain of a beaver, as his name implies. He is not very swift but he is faithful and he can suffer anything from his friends, though at times he may be taken, over by a fit of rage that makes him blind and murderous, though he can easily be stopped. But to survive in Germany in 1928-29 he is doing what he can, anything he comes across: selling newspapers, including the Nazi newspaper, selling erotic literature, selling shoelaces, being part of a gang of thieves, and being a pimp. Then the whole story is nothing but details of a sad ,life that can only be sad. Fassbinder makes it so dense, so packed with hefty details and events that we don't see the thirteen episode flying by. And yet the masterpiece of this long series is the epiloque. Then Fassbinder describes what is happening in Biberkopf's mind after his seizure of insanity when he realizes his Mieze was killed by his supposedly best friend who had caused him to lose an arm when this Reinhold had tried to kill him, the infamous Reinhold. In this epilogue, Fassbinder becomes the most baroque, or even rococo, of all screen artists you can imagine. He brings Biberkopf down into the deranged world of his insanity. He is cruder than Bosh, crueler than Goya, and he depicts the physical dereliction to which Biberkopf is reduced in that mental institution, the haughty condescending carelessness of doctors and personnel, and the haunted mind of his. And in this haunted nightmare he experiences, Fassbinder shows how he is tortured by Reinhold and a few others who have used him in life, how he is tortured by both his lubricity and his refusal to acknowledge it, how he is physically tormented in all kinds of cruel physical punishments repeated ad eternam, a vision of hell borrowed from Dante of course. The point here is that Biberkopf will come out of the institution when he reaches some personal peace in that insanity, in no way the consciousness of his own victimization, but a dull taming of his inner world into a senseless, meaningless and emotionless routine that will transform him into a faithful and reliable concierge looking after cars, lost and abandoned forever in his blessed solitude of the body and the soul. This epilogue is luxuriant and so dense that we just wonder how it could go on like that, over and over again, each situation of victimization opening onto another as naturally as a door you push open and drop closed behind you. Sickening and thickening at the same time, so that you feel totally buried in that grossness and in that cruelty. You are becoming Biberkopf and at the same time the torturing insanity because Biberkopf appears to you as deserving his fate, his insanity, hence your scourges and your violence. It is amazing at this moment to see how Fassbinder manages to make you be a double voyeur and transport you both into Biberkopf himself who cannot rebel in spite of you inhabiting him with the justification to rebel, and thus into the torturing insanity to punish him for not rebelling or to incite him to rebel. The only film-maker Fassbinder can compete with in this perverse mediatic transfer is Clive Barker in his early films or in his Hellraiser series, except that Fassbinder adds an ancient Greek dimension to that delirium that is vital since it will lead Biberkopf to surviving in a mixture of the International, patriotic sings and emerging Nazi military rites, rituals and marching beating tempos.Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University Paris Dauphine, University Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne & University Versailles Saint Quentin en Yvelines

Very long (15 hours in all), very worth seeing. Based on Alfred Doeblin's novel of the same name, "Berlin Alexanderplatz" is set in and around Berlin during the Weimar Republic era, the decade immediately preceding the establishment Hitler's Third Reich in 1933. The workers of '20s Berlin are taking it on the chin. Mass unemployment reigns alongside the greed of the landlord and capitalist classes. People are reacting and acting in various ways to survive. As usual, some of the unemployed turn to crime; others to prostitution. Most of the film's cast will see the dawn of the "thousand year Reich" with their eyes only half way open.But life must go on and it will go on and it does go on in Berlin during Weimar. It's an exciting time as well, a time when the puritanism of the countryside is being exchanged for a chance to live free and wild in a sleepless city chock full of cabarets and kniepe. Of course, the Nazis didn't like this and neither did their supporters, the conservative majorities of rural Germany.As the film's director,R.W. Fassbinder put it,Doeblin's novel,BERLIN ALEXANDERPLATZ, "offered a precise characterization of the twenties; for anyone who knows what came of all that, it's fairly easy to recognize the reasons that made the average German capable of embracing his National Socialism."All this turmoil and potential for explosive change are seen by the audience of "Berlin Alexanderplatz" through the eyes of one guy, Franz Biberkopf. Walk, ride, rob, love, drink and despair with Franz Biberkopf. Best bring along a case or two of good lager while you're immersing yourself in the prelude to "Gotterdamerung".