VERONIKA VOSS Movie Review

Die Sehns Ucht der Veronika Voss

Based on the true story of a fallen German film star, Rainer Werner Fassbinder's baroque and ghoulish Veronika Voss is the closest he ever came to a flat-out horror film. Rosel Zech plays the one-time star who was also a mistress to high-ranking Nazi officials, but by the 1950s is an on-the-nod morphine addict whose supplier—a sadistic female doctor—is bent on bleeding Veronika of every last possession and shred of self-respect. Determined to make Billy Wilder's Sunset Boulevard look like an episode of Barney, Fassbinder's heroined heroine literally wallows in decaying, decadent misery and self-pity. As we hear both Veronika and Dean Martin croon “Memories Are Made of This,” we see a grim vision of the darker side of the post-war German economic miracle unfolding—a universe of soulless zombies in which progress is merely one more day of waking death, and where recollections of the past are almost as terrifying as glimpses of the future. Veronika Voss is both gorgeous and grotesque, and one of the most silken pieces of high melodrama that Fassbinder ever gave us. Grand Prize, 1982 Berlin Film Festival.(There was a spooky soundtrack album, if you can still find it.)

NEXT STOP … The Marriage of Maria Braun, Lola, Sunset Boulevard

1982 (R) 105m/C GE Rosel Zech, Hilmar Thate, Conny Froboess, Anna Marie Duringer, Volker Spengler; D: Rainer Werner Fassbinder; W: Pea Frolich, Peter Marthesheimer; C: Xaver Schwarzenberger; M: Peer Raben. VHS FCT