Customer Reviews

Martha

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Rainer Werner Fassbinder's Martha deserves a wide and appreciative audience. This film demonstrates the power of the visual image to tell a story completely. If you do not speak German and you turn off the subtitles, my guess is that you will understand most of the story just by watching closely what happens. Fassbinder's creative use of the camera to dramatize important moments of the plot development and his placement of his actors in each carefully constructed scene support and dramatize the spoken word.

Martha is a librarian who watches helplessly as her father dies of heart failure on the Spanish Steps in Rome. On her way for help to the German Embassy in Rome, she passes by a man who takes special notice of her. Fassbinder emphasizes this chance meeting by using a startling 360 degree camera shot. We know instantly that this encounter will have important consequences later in the story. In fact, Martha meets the man again at a wedding reception in Germany. After a brief courtship, she marries him and begins her slow descent into a living hell.

The man she marries is Helmut Salamon, a structural engineer who immediately begins to take complete control over Martha's life. He tenders her resignation at her job, establishes her in an old fashioned mansion which Martha hates, isolates her from friends and family, and finally asks that she not go out of the house at all. Sexually he abuses her with his violent passion which includes bites that are clearly visible and painful. He tells her to stop listening to her favorite music. Ironically, she loves Lucia de Lammermoor. He gives her Orlando di Lasso to listen to, which Martha says is boring. He even demands that she read a book on structural engineering. Finally, he removes the phone from the house completing Martha's isolation. Helmut slowly drives Martha insane and enjoys watching her steady deterioration into madness.

If this plot sounds familiar, it is. Fassbinder loved going to the movies as a child and began making his own films as a teenager. He gave his own original stamp to what might have been seen as an overworked plot. With Fassbinder, we come back again to where we have been before, but see with new understanding what we previously thought we had learned.

Margit Cartensen as Martha and Karlheinz Bohm as Helmut are both excellent as is the entire cast, but it is Fassbinder, the director, who is the real star of this show. His creativity and imagination in focusing our attention on what we see give new meaning to our understanding of the power of motion pictures.

Fassbinder died youg, but his legacy in film is secure with pictures like Martha.

Rainer Werner Fassbinder's "Martha" is both a horror movie and (as Fassbinder said of Hitchcock's "Suspicion") "the most drastic film I know against the institution of bourgeois marriage." Filmed for German TV in 1973 with cinematographer Michael Ballhaus (who went on to shoot, among other films, Coppola's "Bram Stoker's Dracula") "Martha" features hysterical performances by Margit Carstensen and Karlheinz Bohm. Fassbinder ripped the plot off from a Cornell Woolrich story, and this kept the film locked up in legal limbo for years. It has been out in Germany for almost ten years, and now American viewers decide for themselves if the title for this review is just guff or what. "Martha" is Fassbainder's riff on Hitchcock's "Suspicion" and "Marnie," George Cukor's "Gaslight," and Max Ophüls' "Caught," all films about a sadistically authoritarian husband who psychologically coerces his wife. Filmed in the candy-color style of Universal-era Hitchcock, "Martha" is super-creepy and hilarious. Cheers to Fantoma for their lovely digital transfer of this criminally under-seen film.

Martha is a typical Fassbinder film of social criticism, this time focused on marriage, how people marry for the wrong reasons, and how this ruins the lives of both husband, wife, and children.

In this movie, Martha, a 31-year-old virgin marries Helmut, a wealthy engineer. From dating to marriage, Helmut completely dominates Martha and makes her do things she doesn't want to do. He makes her ride rollercoasters with him which she fears, he makes her listen to his favorite music, makes her read a book about his profession which she finds boring. He even finally orders her not to leave their house, so that she can exist exclusively for him. He has very violant sex with her, which includes bites, bruises, even when she is heavily sun-burned. He both physically, mentally, and emotionally terrorizes her.

Why does Martha, at least for most of the movie, let Helmut do this to her? This is a result of a loveless marriage between her mother and father. Both were unhappily married, disliked one another, and often expressed that onto Martha, frequently putting her down. Her father makes fun of her all the time. Her mother calls her a disgusting 31-year-old virgin and blames the father's death on her. As a result of this, Martha needs someone like Helmut to dominate her and usually finds Helmuts sadistic behavior acceptable.

Even other people in the movie are heading in the direction of unhappy loveless marriages. Her boss at the library asks her associate to marry him after Martha turns him down. Martha's sister also gets married out of pressure.

At the end, the marriage between Martha and Helmut has tragic consequences. I think the message of the movie is a criticism of society and how many people get married for the wrong reasons and end up destroying their lives.

People anywhere in the world can relate to this movie and I think people should watch it before making the final decision on popping or answering the big question.


Note: The scene where he has violant sex with her on their honeymoon is quite disturbing.

There comes a point in `Martha', actually, a scene that is depicted on the cover of the DVD, when Martha is sitting back to back with the monstrosity she calls a husband; and it is in that scene that the film comes together and makes the loudest most definitive statement possible. My only regret is that the credits did not start to roll at that exact point, for if they had I would be tempted to say it was one of the best films of that given year, and possibly of all time. Instead, `Martha' continues on for a bit longer and steeps further into madness. It's not that the film goes sour, it's just that it makes a drastically different point and I much preferred the point I initially thought was being made.

The film starts with Martha and her father on vacation. Martha's father suddenly dies and Martha finds upon her return home a mother cold and bitter and accusatory.

This is all Martha's fault.

Despite her mother's coldness, Martha decides to decline the marriage proposal of her employer in order to stay and take care of her mother. As time progresses though she realizes that her mother will only destroy her, and so when the mysterious Helmut proposes she accepts, only to soon realize that this sadistic man is going to do more damage than she can imagine.

The film progresses beautifully, lingering long enough to fester in our minds and give us chills. This is the first film I've seen by Rainer Werner Fassbinder, but it will not be the last. He has a rather remarkable way of creating a mood and sustaining it. He's like a more brutal version of Alfred Hitchcock. He captures the madness within his characters; the oppressors and the victims, and embellishes it masterfully. What he does with not only Martha's character but also Helmut's is profound and startling to say the least.

I think that is why the films freefall into extreme insanity kind of put me off a bit. As the film exposes the relationship between Martha and Helmut it rings through with a truth found in abusive relationships. Helmut is conniving and controlling and ruthless and manipulative, and so he knows how to convince Martha that he is loving and merely misunderstood. When Martha tries to explain to her friend her husband's faults she cannot because she doesn't understand that they are truly wrong. So, despite all of her husband's horrid traits and violent actions she stays with him, welcomes him, changes for him (listening to his music, reading his books, staying secluded in his home). So, when she sits back to back with him and recites like a trained animal the exact words to the textbook he demanded she read it is a very fitting and heartbreaking conclusion to the film.

But the film doesn't end there. I won't expose how the film actually ends, but I will say that I only wish it had ended right there. It would have been flawless. This isn't to say that the film is bad or that the ending `ruined' it. The film is still very, very good and it makes a very loud and very gruesome statement; but I am saying that it would have been perfect had it ended in the right place.

The acting is superb, especially on the part of Margit Carstensen, who manages to give the appropriate touches to Martha's hysterics. When she screams at the sight of Helmut, no matter how over the top it may appear, it feels genuine and very fitting when considering her mental state. Despite my feelings on the chosen ending I must admit that the script is very tightly written and Fassbinder's direction only aids the film in reaching all the right places of disturbia. If you like Hitchcock and want to see what a little more edge and darkness would have done for his style then this is a film you do well to see.

This movie awakens feelings in you that you try to supress. You don't know which characters you like and which you think are moronic. Fassbinder's use of camera angles is brilliant and you leave wondering what kind of person you are and whether you have morals or not.

I've had a difficult time trying to digest Fassbinder. As congenially as I can process his work-- ugly, obvious and shrill as humanity itself (I consider 'Why Does Herr R. Run Amok?' his seminal accomplishment)-- I figure he falls somewhere between Godard and Corman. His insatiable need to press on to the next work, granted his inability to focus on the current one, is well documented and it shows in 'Martha,' most apparently in his lack of attention to dramatic structure. In the opening act he effectively establishes Martha as a womanchild, a spinster-before-her-time, loved but sexually reviled by her father, wholly unsympathetic in character, pitiable for her needs both emotional and physical. Enter out of the ether Helmut (played scantly but memorably by Peeping Tom's Karlheinz Bohm), a controlling, often sadistic lover and soon-to-be husband, who subjects the pathetic Martha to a gauntlet of psychological rope-a-dopes, most of which she fails predictably. Over the course of the two acts that follow, archetypal masculine pupeteering ensues. Problem is, creepy as the going gets, and as nicely staged and photographed as the sordid material is (the sunburn/sex scene is perhaps the truest, subtlest moment of onscreen torture I've ever witnessed), there's little doubt of the outcome and we have equally little feeling for the victim who begs oppression as we have for the clever oppressor. In other words, Helmut's cruelty is more or less neutralized by Martha's ingratiating emptiness (which, sadly, is probably Fassbinder's point). It's a straightforward, shudder-inducing example of domestic Stockholm syndrome (forget Sirk, et al) that entertains morbidly, but fails to enlighten. Fantoma's presentation is excellent.

See This Movie.You will never see another like it.
THEY WILL NEVER ALLOW ANOTHER LIKE IT TO BE MADE AGAIN (!!!).
A brilliant black comedy,
On a subject never before seen in a movie or elsewhere for that
matter.
This movie is as unique as CALIGULA.
YOU'LL LAUGH TILL YOU DROP (!!!).
HILLARIOUS********

Pure Genious,
The world will never again see
a movie as great.
Should be compulsory Viewing at all
Boys Schools and for all Young Men
Today.
It will Open Up their Eyes,
Completely.