Berlin Alexanderplatz (1980)
Adaptation of a late 1920's German novel by great German director and playwright Rainer Werner Fassbinder in form of what's, from a modern perspective, a 14 episodes miniseries produced for german television. According to Fassbinder himself though, it's a film of 13 parts and an epilogue so that's what I will be treating it as. It's not the only adaptation of the book in question, there was another made all the way back in 1931, and filmed on location, and yet another one made in 2020 that reimagines it as an immigrants story, but definitely the only one that made a significant mark on the history of german cinema.
Berlin Alexanderplatz follows ex convict Franz Biberkopf's experiences in the urban wasteland of the Weimar Republic's Berlin. We meet Biberkopf at the end of a 4 year prison sentence for drunkenly beating to death his wife. This points to one of the main reasons Alexanderplatz is difficult to watch. It's centered around a character that, I can promise you, you will not like. Biberkopf is a drunk, a womanizer, a wife beater, a habitual criminal and a hypocrite, he shows little self control and little regard for the consequences of his behaviour, not for himself and not for the people around him. His most sympathethic character trait is, for all intents and purposes, how obviously mentally unwell he is, prone to uncontrolled fits of rage, mental breakdowns and various types of compulsive behaviour (random singing being one of the most notable ones). He is a man for whom it'd be difficult to survive, much less function, in any type of society, much less in the harsh environment of post WW1 Germany. Most of the story deals with him trying, and failing, to find stable employment, maintain a functional relationship or simply live an honest live. He ends up selling newspapers for the Nazi Party, along with some other things, eventually falls in with organized crime, from which he sustains a crippling injury and ends up living off of the earnings of his evenutal girlfriend whose name is Amelie, goes by Sonia and he calls Mieze (which means Kitten) who works as a prostitute. Biberkopf goes through quite a lot of women throughout the story, indicating, if nothing else, a period where life for a single woman was so miserable enough that even a lowlife like him seems like an attractive alternative. Some of these women being hand me downs from fellow crook Reinhold, who becomes a rather central character for the story and kind of a foil to Franz.
Berlin Alexanderplatz is a character study, mostly. Not entirely, Fassbinder also gets in his share of sociopolitical commentary mainly pertinent to the time it was set in.
If there is one thing Berlin Alexanderplatz makes clear is that 1920's Germany was a dreadful time to be alive. It's often overlooked, considering it was both preceded and followed by even worse time periods, but Weimar Germany was a time of poverty, crime and violence for most people. There were some promising cultural and artistic developments for sure, but those are not what Berlin Alexanderplatz was interested in. As a matter of fact, Berlin Alexanderplatz offers a solid 15 hours of pure, undiluted misery. Miserable people in a miserable place in a miserable time causing misery for themselves and each other. It's a very high quality production, fantastic, even, but it was one of the most actively depressing things I've ever sat through. By all means, it looks gorgeous, filmed on grainy 16mm film with sepia toned lighting that invokes old photographs, the best period accurate set design early 1980's german television could afford and a musical score that bridges the whimsical and the mournful. The actors do not only provide a wide range of regional German accents but also some truly visceral performances, most notably Günther Lamprecht playing Biberkopf, part emotionally unhinged brute, part childlike buffoon and his opposite Gottfried John as Reinhold, a weasely, stuttering crook who, in his own way, is no less mentally deranged.
What connects those two men for most of the series is an understated homoerotic subtext, which the finale eventually turns into text, that would appear to be one of the main reasons for their inability to live a normal. I do wonder whether that subtext was present in the original novel, or whether it based on the interpretation by director Fassbinder, who was openly bisexual and at the time of this poduction, in a homosexual relationship.It is fairly well known that the extended 2 hours epilogue, poetically named "My Dream of the Dream of Franz Biberkopf" Fassbinder's own invention which, for the record, is shouldn't surprise anyone who's seen it. Abandoning the modernist stylings of the previous 13 hours which, while frequently idiosyncratic, provided a relatively straight forward delivery of the depicted events, the epilogue jumps right into postmodernist subjectivity and hallucinatory imagery that invokes either Stanley Kubrick at his least or Alejandro Jodorowsky at his most coherent. Most of Alexanderplatz's finale delves into the the hallucination of Franz Biberkopf, now held in a mental institution, and features anachronistic visions of the future, twisted sexuality, altered versions of past events and apparitions of past characters and more religious symbolism than Hideaki Anno could think of, along with some other things I genuinely can't believe ever made it onto public German television. It certainly seems extremely experimental for its time, yet it's reflected in many later character driven works of fiction that seek to portray the mindscape of their central characters, whether their name is Tony Soprano, Bojack Horseman or Shinji Ikari.
Berlin Alexanderplatz offers insight into German post war cinema at its most ambitious, most sophisticated but also its least accesible. It's not, by any stretch, an enjoyable or entertaining watch. It's too commited to its own bleakness for that. Frankly, I could never read books like that either. Fassbinder depicts interwar Germany as a hell of its own making and its people as lost souls, both suffering and inflicting torment on each other. I could tell you how the series ends, but what's left unsaid is, of course, that the actual end of these characters is in the history books. Within a decade of Berlin Alexanderplatz's events, Germany would enter a period of brutal dictatorship and yet another war. Every suggestion that things might, in the short term, get better, was disproven by history. Fassbinder has neither compassion or contempt for that era and those people. The story took an interest in those people at their lowest, most pathethic and most despicable. And interest that does, in some way, seem more genuinely sympathethic than any actual display of compassion would. If there's one thing to be said about it, it will make you feel emotions. But they're probably not going to be very pleasant.
