MUBI

First they worm their way into your heart and then they spring their nasty surprises. Only, you are not a saint, you are just as bad as the worst of them. The only difference is that you know it. You are repeatedly given the opportunity to learn the same lesson and each time you fail the stakes get even higher. And when you finally realize your mistake and decide to go straight? Life gets a lot worse and seems like it will never get better. You feel sorry for yourself. You are bigger than all your friends because you have a bigger heart.

Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s detailed and sprawling 14-part adaptation of Alfred Doblin’s 1929 modernist tract is one of the director’s most revered films, brutalized in its day for over indulgence, vulgarity, and incomprehensibility, but since has become, thanks to the Cult of Fassbinder, and recently, the Criterion Collection’s impressive DVD transfer, a landmark of long format storytelling. That the story takes nearly five hours to finally settle into place is an example of the care in which Fassbinder puts into faithfully adapting Doblin’s multiple narrative structures, painting a portrait of Weimer era Berlin, through the eyes of recently released prisoner Franz Biberkopf (Gunter Lamprecht) and his various ill-fated friendships, teeming with life, subjugated by corruption, hedonism, and swirling political change. Fassbinder’s direction is fascinating, employing a constantly moving camera and huge, but intimate sets designed as a careful study in browns and refracted lights, dancing through Biberkopf’s waking nightmare (which turns fateful when his attempts to stay clean lead him to a gang that inadvertently causes the amputation of his right arm, and when his beloved girlfriend is murdered by the same man who caused his accident) with a mixture of surrealism and stream-of-consciousness narration. This is a 15 and a half hour film that is anything but self explanatory; the more Biberkopf professes a wish to change his life, fate intervenes with one disaster after another, and it’s a testament to the brilliance of Fassbinder, Lamprecht, and his immediate supporting players (Barbara Sukowa, Gottfried John, Hanna Schygulla), that for a film with such detailed characterizations, joy, and tragedy, the modernist spirit of the text, and the exhaustive heft of the film-making, always keeps us at the right distance, just outside of intimate, but devastated nonetheless.