Martha (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1974) (Patreon)

One of the handful of Fassbinders I had not seen, Martha is striking for a number of reasons. Even now, I find myself struggling as to whether to label it "minor Fassbinder," or "B-level," because that's not exactly what it is. To be more precise, Fassbinder's better-known and more highly regarded work -- Maria Braun, Fear Eats the Soul, In a Year of 13 Moons, Petra von Kant -- takes all of the stylistic and thematic elements that the director absorbed from Douglas Sirk, Brecht, and to a lesser extent German Expressionism, and yokes those moves to more broadly-based content, such as racism or postwar German history.

By contrast, Martha is a pure, crystalline auteur object. It is almost hermetic in its examination of Sirkian maneuvers, adapting the master's heightened melodramatic form to a more contemporary (and more dangerous) form of feminist inquiry. In Martha, Fassbinder and Margit Carstensen, in one of her finest performances, work together to generate an artificial world of sexist confinement and gaslighting which is actually entirely plausible. As such, Martha is a demonstration of a single idea -- that misogyny is as indefensible and nonsensical as it is pervasive. But it works that idea through to its tragic, inevitable conclusion.

Martha (Carstensen) is a 31-year-old archival librarian. She has a domineering mother (Giselda Fackeldey) who has belittled her all her life, and a father (Adrien Hoven) whose demeanor towards his daughter implies abuse. Despite these obstacles, , she is reasonably happy because she loves her job. However, she makes a fatal mistake (within the film-world's logic) by refusing the proposal of her nice-guy boss (Wolfgang Schenk), to whom she is not attracted. He immediately proposes to his secretary, who joyfully accepts, because by "objective standards," he is a good catch.

While in Italy, Martha had a brief moment with a man with whom she experienced an immediate connection. She encounters him later. He is Helmut Salomon (Karlheinz Böhm), a wealthy engineer. He romances her, they marry, and then he begins controlling her life: resigning her library position on her behalf, moving her into a house he chose without her input, telling her what to read and what to listen to, and eventually refusing to allow her to leave the house when he is away. He is also a violent lover who forces Martha to be "available" whenever he desires her.

Fassbinder makes much of Martha's naivety, as well as her low self-esteem. At one point, she meets with a girlfriend to ask what married life is supposed to be like, and once it is established that Helmut doesn't beat her, Martha cannot fully articulate why she is afraid of him. It is as if she does not know that she is entitled to freedom, and none of the characters around her seem to think she ought to have anything to complain about. She was an aging spinster who "married up," and she should be grateful.

With his ultra-controlled camerawork, restrictive framing, and claustrophobic close-ups and zooms, Fassbinder abjures all subtlety in this film. This is not the one you'd want to show to someone as a gateway-Fassbinder, because if you are not already sympathetic to his project, it is likely to seem ridiculous. (In fact, I have seen Martha described as a black comedy, although its humor mostly escaped me. It reminded me a lot of Matteo Garrone's more recent study of a sadistic heterosexual relationship, Primo amore.) But as a study in controlled outrage, Martha is quite potent. Although it is actually adapted from a short story by Cornell Woolrich, this is Fassbinder's A Doll's House. But unlike Nora, Martha is the recipient of the masculine energy that, after Nazism, had to go somewhere.