Germany Without Tears

By RICHARD CORLISS

BERLIN ALEXANDERPLATZ Directed and Written by R. W. Fassbinder

Franz Biberkopf presses his hands to the sides of his head, as if he were about to pulverize a rancid cantaloupe, and screams. He staggers wildly about the apartment-house courtyard, its high walls allowing the merest tantalizing glimpse of sky. This is Germany, 1927. As the nation spun from the humiliation of Versailles to economic and social anarchy, and then into the toxic delirium of the Third Reich, so Franz spins. A laborer and part-time pimp who has just been released from prison after serving four years for beating a girlfriend to death, Franz has few resources of intelligence or nobility upon which to build a decent new life. He is dull and heavy, a Zolaesque human beast, but less a villain than a big lug. His attention span is so short he cannot even hold a grudge. He feels no remorse for the wrong he has done, no vengeance toward those who have wronged him. His life is determined by forces--of personality, of society, of fate--he has neither the will nor the power to control. He is the simple, dogged, malleable soul of Germany between the wars, when there was little sunlight and a person had every right to scream.

In his novel Berlin Alexanderplatz (1929), Alfred Doeblin dissected and described his characters' passions with the meticulous disinterest of a big-city coroner ("Then she sank to the part of his body she thought was his heart but was in fact his sternum and the upper lobe of his left lung"). A physician like his spiritual contemporary Celine, Doeblin saw Germany as a huge human slaughterhouse and Franz as "a big, good-natured sheep.' Mixing statistics of death and disease with the story of some petty, brutal people living in East Berlin, Doeblin created a 600-page epic that was part newsreel, part nightmare--a documentary melodrama written in blood and neon. Through his art he exercised the control that Franz and his friends could never exert on their lives.

So it was with Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Germany's pre-eminent stage and film director died last year at 36, a fat, wasted mess, bloated with drink and drugs like so many of his movies' protagonists. Yet his films, such as Ali and The Marriage of Maria Braun, were models of brisk precision (they had to be: he made 40 or so in only 13 years), and his camera was a most fastidious voyeur, observing every ruction of sexual violence with sympathy at a distance. Doeblin and Fassbinder were a perfect book-and-movie match, and the young director knew it. He read Berlin Alexanderplatz as a boy of 15, reread it at 20, and realized that "an enormous part of myself, my attitudes, my reactions, so many of the things I had considered all my own, were none other than those described by Doeblin. I had . . . unconsciously made Doeblin's fantasy my own life." In 1980 he got the chance to turn his life into a movie, when Bavaria Studios gave him $6 million for a 14-episode film of Berlin Alexanderplatz. The relentless, triumphant result--15 hours, 21 minutes of degradation redeemed by art--opens this week in a Manhattan moviehouse. (It will be shown in five weekly segments, each about three hours long.)

Once out of prison, Franz (Gunter Lamprecht) takes an oath to stay honest. In his terms, that means peddling tie clips, shoelaces, sex books, even Nazi newspapers, but not pimping or joining a gang of thieves led by the brusque dandy Pums (Ivan Desny) and including his friend Meek (Franz Buchrieser) and the reptilian sadist Reinhold (Gottfried John). Franz's reward for innocently going with the gang on a heist one night is to be pushed by Reinhold from the van and have his right arm crushed under the wheel of an approaching car. Reinhold pushes other things on Franz: his cast-off women. Soon the one-armed man is a secondhand stud for a series of gross, silly and pathetic trollops. There are three exceptions: Lina (Elisabeth Trissenaar), gorgeous and sassy, whom Franz meets soon after his release from prison; Eva (Hanna Schygulla), a former mistress who is now an expensive call girl; and Mieze (Barbara Sukowa), a simple, gentle girl of small shrugs and a guileless smile. By the end, with Reinhold's malefic help, she and Franz will have become the secret agents of their own destruction.

Who are these women, that the horizon of their hopes is so low? And why do they stay with their roughhouse Romeos? Because the alternative is a new man just as bad as the last one, or, worse, no man at all. They give everything to their men and expect nothing in return, and so they are not surprised when their men turn into beasts. That is natural, Doeblin and Fassbinder suggest: we are all predatory animals, driven by the compulsions to fornicate and dominate. A bear of a man, Franz makes love with feral ferocity, strapping his mate around his body, biting her neck in carnivore passion. It takes a special kind of actor to play Franz, and Lamprecht, who looks like a cross between Emil Tannings and Hermann Goering, has the stolid majesty for the role. As for Fassbinder's actresses, they have always been lush galvanizers who surrender voluptuously to the jagged contours of melodrama. The viewer surrenders, just as willingly, to Trissenaar, a Diane Keaton-type, but with brains and guts and class; to Schygulla, with her wicked-witch profile and wicked, witty mouth; and to Sukowa, who, as sweet sad Mieze, blazes trails of girlish naivete into the jungle of male psychopathy.

No film that is the length of Wagner's Ring will be without its longueurs, and this one falls into a second-act slump that lasts about three hours. But the best and the most of Berlin is the best that Fassbinder--or just about anyone else lately--has done. He balances the weight of Doeblin's carefully repetitious dialogue with the buoyancy of his creamy, elegiac visual style. He interrupts the naturalism of lives on the skids with scenes of shocking surrealism: an old goat-man slaughters a calf; Mieze's corpse turns to soft-focus glitter, as if she had become in death a Hollywood star; a scorpion clambers up the entwined legs of two lovers, across the woman's breast and into the bloody gape of her slit throat. In the past, Fassbinder had seemed a master without masterpieces, teasing with his outsize talent but never quite delivering. And now, posthumously, a glorious surprise. Berlin Alexanderplatz is the goods.

--By Richard Corliss This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.