timmy_501 Review of Effi Briest

Effi Briest (1974)

Sublime visuals marred by ungainly narration and dialogue

[7/10 · 25 August 2010]

By 1974 RW Fassbinder had reached the height of his creative powers. With Fontane - Effi Briest, Fassbinder consistently amazes with his visuals; there's something sublime about his casual mastery of angles, reflections, framing, and camera movements. Given the power of his images it's also somewhat shocking to see how clunky the script is. Fassbinder saddles the film with narration that is only interrupted by tedious, drawn out conversations and extraneous intertitles. Various characters narrate the film at different times but more often than not the narrator is actually omniscient and entirely divorced from the story; this device is just part of a bigger problem: a slavish devotion to the source material that isn't kind to the book or the film. One particularly important moment is conveyed via a stagy, histrionic monologue when it could easily have come out naturally in conversation. Overall, Effi Briest is one of the most frustrating films I've ever seen as the marriage between the amazing visuals and the awkward script is no more successful than the doomed relationship between the naive titular character and her pedantically moralistic husband.