Part of Trilogies, Part 2 and The BRD Trilogy
See also: Melodrama and Politics: A Rainer Werner Fassbinder Seminar (Wed, Mar 20 | 6:30-7:45pm)
Germany in the autumn of 1957: Lola, a seductive cabaret singer-prostitute (Barbara Sukowa) exults in her power as a temptress of men, but she wants out — she wants money, property and love. Pitting a corrupt building contractor (Mario Adorf) against the new straight-arrow building commissioner (Armin Mueller-Stahl), Lola launches an outrageous plan to elevate herself in a world where everything, and everyone, is for sale. Shot in childlike candy colors, Fassbinder’s homage to Josef von Sternberg’s classic THE BLUE ANGEL stands as a satiric tribute to capitalism.
“Remains a gorgeously opulent post-war German fable… As with Fassbinder’s best pictures, finds the raw humanity at the heart of the film’s heightened reality. Indeed, LOLA resists complete cynicism — another recurring feature of Fassbinder’s cinema is his insistence on the humane among the darkness.” —Christopher Machell, Cinevue “LOLA is centered on West Germany’s ‘economic miracle’ of the postwar years, and lifts the veil on the corruption — political, industrial, emotional, and sexual — on which it depended, while also underscoring the ugly irony that the economy was growing and the construction business booming in order to make up for wartime destruction and cover up the spectre of Nazism. That wreckage is present everywhere in the film at a human level, in the loss of lives, the scattering of families, and the ambient presence of the wounded and the traumatized.” —Richard Brody, New Yorker
