Veronika Voss (1982)

 

Veronika Voss (1982)

 

Hollywood’s tragic stars hold our imagination far more than the happy ones, Marilyn Monroe being the best example of this. First famous for her beauty, she solidified her career with unexpected talent, but only became truly unforgettable in the wake of her self-destruction. Her fame now transcends her body of work which I suspect few people watch anymore, eclipsing those with longer careers and greater range, who we actually do continue to watch.

 

This seems true in other countries where the film industry is as potent a cultural force as it is here. It is certainly true in Germany, the nation who most rivaled the US in world cinema until the eruption of World War II. One of their great tragic figures was Sybille Schmitz and her death, like Monroe’s, has allowed her fame to transcend her body of work, which is mostly from an era that Germans now rightfully have become suspicious of all its aesthetic achievements; you see, Schmitz was one of the Nazis’ great matinee idols (I’ve seen two of her films,  my favorite is the pre-war, F W Murnau’s “Vampyr” (1930), but she was not especially memorable in that landmark supernatural thriller; she stood out more in the in the Fascist-propagandist take on the tragedy of the “Titanic” (1943) directed by Werner Klingler & Herbert Selpin).

 

A large part of her legend is its linking to another great tragic figure of German cinema, her fall into the abyss was fictionalized in the second-to-last, and perhaps greatest, film of the self-destructive genius Rainer Werner Fassbinder. The film did not claim to be a true story, reportedly it’s a pretty loose interpretation, but Schmitz was a figure for whom most would only know the sketch-outline of her biography, and the film was so faithful to that sketch, so now it’s probably impossible for even a German to separate that artifice from the woman who once really lived and worked, again much like Monroe.

 

So, a quick sketch of Schmitz’s life from Wiki:

 

“[During WWII] Sybille's career remained strong even though she was never sanctioned by the Reichsfilmkammer and ran afoul of Joseph Goebbels. However, her explicitly non-Aryan appearance relegated her mostly to [the roles of] femme-fatales or problematic foreign women.

 

“After World War II, Schmitz was shunned by the German film community for continuously working during the Third Reich, and it became difficult for her to land roles… She … was [also] beset with alcoholism, drug abuse, depression, several suicide attempts and the committal to a psychiatric clinic. Her self-destructive behavior and numerous affairs with both men and women further alienated Sybille from the film industry and her own husband, screenwriter Harald G. Petersson.

 

“On April 13, 1955, Schmitz committed suicide with an overdose of sleeping pills, she was 45 years old. At the time of her death, Sybille had been living in Munich with a woman named Ursula Moritz, a physician who allegedly sold her morphine at an inflated rate and kept Sybille doped up while squandering the little funds she had available to her. Schimtz's family claimed that once the actress proved to be of no use to Moritz, the ‘good doctor’ facilitated her suicide. One year after Sybille Schmitz's death, charges were filed against Dr. Moritz for improper medical treatment.”

 

That is an almost perfect summary of the plot of the film “Veronika Voss” (the German title translates as “The Longing of Veronika Voss”) with the notable exception that Rosel Zech in the title role was a traditional Aryan beauty (her casting may have been influenced by Schmitz’s kick-name "the German Garbo") and at the end of the film it is implied that the villainous doctors would go unpunished.

 

Fassbinder labeled this film the third of his trilogy about the West German "economic miracle" of the 1950s and 1960s (the other two were "The Marriage of Maria Braun" (1979) and "Lola"(1981)). All three cast an extremely cold eye on the soul of the nation rebuilding itself; despite the surging wealth, the title characters are always in difficult straights, making desperately bad choices or soul-crippling compromises, and are ultimately unable to escape history. They could be called unrelentingly anti-capitalist, but as each financial failure is always as much a product of personal failing as any larger, impersonal, system, so it seems more accurate to say that like many post-war artists, Fassbinder rejected both the promises of the entrepreneurial right and the collectivist security of the left. I guess that no matter how disenchanted one was with the “Free Market,” it was hard to be a Communist when every sunrise was shadowed by the Berlin Wall.

 

In this film Fassbinder made the bold choice of not only shooting in black and white, but using it in the context of a wide-screen print. He clutters most frames with representational symbols of the wealth that is slipping through Voss’ fingers or being acquired by another. His camera sweeps through every setting to make sure we visually grasp every object (cinematography by Xaver Schwarzenberger, set design by Rolf Zehetbauer). He co-authored the script with Peter Marthesheimer and Pea Frolich, making the humiliation and shame of WWII hang over everything like a ghost. Fassbinder himself grew up during the occupation of Germany and as a child was forced to relocate repeatedly because of extreme poverty and the nation’s shrinking territorial claims. Disdain for the Nazis is reflexive to almost all the characters, and the only really sympathetic souls in the film are a sweet, elderly couple who prove to be Concentration Camp survivors (the Treibels played by Johanna Hofer and Rudolf Platte). Still, Fassbinder chose to cast his own mother, Lilo Pempeit, in the small part of a boutique manager who longingly says of the war years ''Still, they were good times, too.”

 

His visual aesthetic references not the era it was made, the 1950s wherein it was set, or even the war-years that haunt everything, but the more glamourous Weimar era, a fever-dream of indulgence, decadence, sexual domination and perversion (at least in the media’s representations, actually Weimar was a time of economic collapse and increasingly politicized street fighting). Stalking this beautiful hell are all the mundanities of an everyday world that offers so little. As Roger Ebert put it, “This is a movie of Veronika Voss's life as Veronika might have pictured it in one of her own nightmares.”

 

In the first scene we are introduced to Veronika watching herself on the movie screen (with Fassbinder in a cameo as an audience member leaning on the seat-back behind her). Veronika seeing herself younger and more secure in her stardom does not have a positive effect of her mood.

 

She leaves the theater and is caught in the rain. Chivalrously coming to her rescue with an umbrella is the film’s male lead, a Journalist named Robert Krohn (Hilmar Thate), who does not recognize her, which in of itself intrigues her. It’s a lovely scene, promising a far more romantic film than we will get, with a glamourous damsel-in-distress and an everyman knight in shining armor.

 

A few days later Veronika telephones Robert and asks him to meet her for tea. Her behavior at the restaurant sets the audience up for the fact that there will be no happy endings. She successfully charms Robert and convinces him she is somewhat unhinged. She talks about her ''new picture'' (we will learn that at the time of the conversation the deal is not secure), she fusses about the restaurant lighting, she goes as far to say, ''I like to seduce helpless men,'' and finally she pressures him into lending her 300 marks to buy a broach.

 

Robert seemingly accepts all of this, but his sensitivity is notable for its impassiveness, he’s smitten but not taking her seriously; he’s deciding if he does, or does not, want to take something from her (it’s a deftly down-played performance). We’re quite deep into the film before his detachment disappear, he’s a weird mix of obsessed and non-committal, and when it eventually falls on him to be a hero, we’re well prepared for how ineffectual he will prove to be.

 

After Robert leaves, she sells the brooch back to the same store demonstrating she’s a beggar who creates absurd contrivances to disguise, if only to herself, that she begs.

 

With these few deft scenes, the film establishes Veronika as both a pitiable and contemptible, while Zech’s performance keeps her compelling. It’s a brave take on the character, unafraid to be explicit as to what a despicable weakling Veronika is. Her life is all contrivance and facade, and Zech expresses that by making each movement a self-conscious pose. It a performance of rare integration with the medium it’s played out in, and it becomes impossible to draw a line between the Actress’ and Director’s shaping of our impressions, Veronika seems to shed, then regain, decades of age with a tilt of her chin, a new camera angle, a temporary trick of the light.

 

As her behavior worsens, she becomes the measure of other’s moral failings. This is most explicitly demonstrated several nights later when Robert returns to his apartment with his long-time, and long-suffering, girlfriend Henriette von Hasberg (Cornelia Froboess); they find Veronika waiting for him on the stairs. Shockingly, Veronika puts on haughty airs as she bluntly attempts to pick up Robert right in front of Henriette. More shocking still, he goes with her. Later, in another perverse twist, Henriette will become Robert’s ally in his ineffectual attempt at rescuing Veronika from the villains (the script doesn’t give any cast member an easy character to play, but Froboess may have been given the most difficult role and she’s really good).

 

All films about doomed and aging starlets will be compared to Billy Wilder’s “Sunset Boulevard” (1950). “Veronika Voss” accepts that and uses it to its advantage. It references the older film repeatedly and explicitly; a notable example is the scenes in the doomed character’s mansion. It is lavish but looks as it had not been inhabited for years. The furniture is covered with sheets and there is no electricity; as she lights a candelabra, she makes the excuse "because they are so much more flattering to a woman." The most notable difference between the two films is the light in which they cast their doomed leads, Fassbinder deliberately encourages the starkest possible contrasts between Zech’s unsympathetic Veronika, already deeply immersed in her own death wish, and Gloria Swanson’s impassioned Norma Desmond, though also drowning, is still alive enough to struggle and even expresses a moment or two of joy.

 

During Veronika and Robert’s first night together, Veronika wakes up in a fit. Half-crazed, she demands to be taken to the offices of Dr. Katz (Annemarie Duringer). Robert dutifully complies, but when she tells him to leave her there, he stays. He’s a Journalist, he knows a story when he sees it, and this is a story that will require a little detective work. But as he waits in his car, doing surveillance on the front door, he falls asleep – again foreshadowing of his later failures. The villains see him, he doesn’t see them. The mystery is solved for the audience while the alleged hero remains in the dark.

 

The clinic is blinding white — walls, floors, furniture, and staff clothing. A wall of windows looks upon a waiting room, where other patients peered in needfully. Katz dominates Veronika (think “kat und maus”), but is in turn dominated by another woman (Doris Schade) apparently her lover. Another fixture of the office is an African-American G.I.  (Günther Kaufmann, who was Fassbinder's sometime lover) who says nothing, appears not even to understand German, as he prepares the doctor’s illicit cocktails. Whenever he is present, country western songs of capitalist exploitation like “16 Tons” (Tennessee Ernie Ford's 1955 version) or American military prowess like "The Battle of New Orleans" (Johnny Horton's 1959 version), play on a small radio in the background.

 

Though Veronika’s “next picture” was a lie, she does wheedle a bit part from her former agent. In another reference to “Sunset Boulevard” that film’s the Director (Volker Spengler) is attired as Billy Wilder often did in promotional photos. She only has two lines in her scene, but blows them again and again because she’s rattled and craving fix. This is witnessed not only be Robert but her ex-husband Max Rehbein (Armin Mueller-Stahl). The two men bond, and Max explains to Robert that Veronika a hopeless addict.

 

That conversation spells out to Robert everything he should’ve already known, it’s an exposition of what we in the audience have already seen. But Robert was already transparent to the film’s villains, so though finally spurred into action, they are always several steps ahead of him. Fassbinder is a nihilist here, seeing happiness or the ambition to do good as pure self-delusion. The world belongs to the greedy and venal, while humanism usually a lie, and when not, mere folly.

 

Veronika is so desperate to play any part she willfully casts herself as the tragic heroine in a movie playing out in her own head. Her death scene intercuts the physical agony she’s enduring with a dream where she’s attending her own opulent farewell party, attended by her adoring fans, who are played by the characters in the film that have either betrayed or abandoned her. And again, American period pop music plays, this time “Memories are Made of This,” (performed by Zech herself). Though not quite the last scene in the film, it’s the equivalent of the final moments of “Sunset Boulevard” where delusional Norma intones, “I’m ready for my close-up.”

 

Fassinger, hugely prolific (directed 40 features, 24 stage plays, and two TV miniseries in a mere 16-year career) was already the great (sometimes despised) champion on the international film-festival circuit even before "Veronika Voss" premiered. He was almost as notorious for his libertine extremism as for that body of work, twice married to women who were his professional collaborators, but also openly homosexual. He cruised gay bars at night for drugs and sex and then behaved as a brutalizing bully on the set during the day.

 

The film was released in Febuary 1982, and by June of that year he making desperate 3am phone-calls to his close friend and follow Director Daniel Schmid, who was in a different country at the time so too far away to come to his aid. "He would shout at me: How are you able to just sit there and look outside the window? How can you? How can you just sit on a rock and look at the sea? How can everybody else be so lucky?" Finally, one night, Fassbinder told Schmid that he’d flushed all his drugs down the toilet — everything except for one last line of cocaine. The next morning, Fassbinder was found dead, cigarette still in hand, video-tape machine playing before him. He was 36 years old.

 

Trailer:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jExWXzmVToU