A Fassbinder film is always interesting, though this TV movie is far from the German wunderkind's best.
Margit Carstensen is good as Margot, a woman with a prescription-drug problem and visual distortions who fears that she is going mad. "I have a deep depression and I need my pills to pull me out of it," she says.
Despite her having a husband, a lover -- "For you I'd go to prison," the pharmacist tells her -- two kids, an extended family living nearby, and a psychiatrist, there is no one in Margot's world who truly cares.
Margot's stern and hyper-critical mother-in-law (played by Birgitte Mira of Fassbinder's "Ali Fear Eats the Soul") and sister-in-law (Irm Hermann, the one-time secretary who Fassbinder turned into a screen star) never ease up in their commentary of Margot's normal behaviors, like showing affection to her kids. Another associate chastises Margot merely because she tries to get exercise by swimming laps!
At one point, Morgot asks her husband (Ulrich Faulhaber) why he never asks how she is doing, and the imagination-challenged clod says he can see all that just by looking at her. Yes, Margot's stuck in a crazy-making world. Yet, when she tries to explain her reality to her shrink, all he can say is her autonomic-nervous system is acting up!
Fassbinder was a wonderful observer of the idiocies of human interaction. And he certainly nails some of them here. However, the movie is long enough that we yearn for a little more plot. Instead, we get way too much camera time devoted to Margot's pretty face, lustrous hair, and model-perfect makeup as we observe her mooning around her flat and worrying about her sanity. (In this regard, "Angst" recalls Polanski's "Repulsion" of a decade earlier.)
It's as if Fassbinder tries to compensate for the shallow plot by informing us in the film's last few frames that Mr. Bauer (Kurt Raab) has committed suicide. Since we know next to nothing about this enigmatic, stalker-like character, we're left hanging and unclear about what to think.
As with other Fassbinder films, this movie makes excellent use of American folk music, in this case sung by a young Leonard Cohen (i.e., "Lover Come Back to Me" and "Why Don't You Try?").
I was able to view this somewhat obscure work during a free, Friday-night screening at New York City's Museum of Modern Art.
Margit Carstensen is good as Margot, a woman with a prescription-drug problem and visual distortions who fears that she is going mad. "I have a deep depression and I need my pills to pull me out of it," she says.
Despite her having a husband, a lover -- "For you I'd go to prison," the pharmacist tells her -- two kids, an extended family living nearby, and a psychiatrist, there is no one in Margot's world who truly cares.
Margot's stern and hyper-critical mother-in-law (played by Birgitte Mira of Fassbinder's "Ali Fear Eats the Soul") and sister-in-law (Irm Hermann, the one-time secretary who Fassbinder turned into a screen star) never ease up in their commentary of Margot's normal behaviors, like showing affection to her kids. Another associate chastises Margot merely because she tries to get exercise by swimming laps!
At one point, Morgot asks her husband (Ulrich Faulhaber) why he never asks how she is doing, and the imagination-challenged clod says he can see all that just by looking at her. Yes, Margot's stuck in a crazy-making world. Yet, when she tries to explain her reality to her shrink, all he can say is her autonomic-nervous system is acting up!
Fassbinder was a wonderful observer of the idiocies of human interaction. And he certainly nails some of them here. However, the movie is long enough that we yearn for a little more plot. Instead, we get way too much camera time devoted to Margot's pretty face, lustrous hair, and model-perfect makeup as we observe her mooning around her flat and worrying about her sanity. (In this regard, "Angst" recalls Polanski's "Repulsion" of a decade earlier.)
It's as if Fassbinder tries to compensate for the shallow plot by informing us in the film's last few frames that Mr. Bauer (Kurt Raab) has committed suicide. Since we know next to nothing about this enigmatic, stalker-like character, we're left hanging and unclear about what to think.
As with other Fassbinder films, this movie makes excellent use of American folk music, in this case sung by a young Leonard Cohen (i.e., "Lover Come Back to Me" and "Why Don't You Try?").
I was able to view this somewhat obscure work during a free, Friday-night screening at New York City's Museum of Modern Art.