Mother Kusters’ Trip To Heaven (1975) is a TV movie about a widow who unwillingly participates in distortions of her late husband’s memory. Pulled between communists and anarchists, both of whom wish to make her a symbol in their cause, and systematically abandonded or ignored by her family, Brigitte Mira’s character is put through the director’s usual cruel ringer until the endings. Strangely, Fassbinder wrote two finales to this tragicomic tale, one astonishingly more violent and nasty than the one he settled upon. I much prefer the latter, where she manages to move on and maybe find love, to the original, where she dies of an anarchist’s bullet wound in the arms of her feckless son. The real star of this is Ingird Caven, who is delightful as the worn, ambitious singer and daughter of the protagonist, who uses her father’s death to cynically advance her lovelife and career. Her sparring with sister-in-law Irm Hermann is fantastic, too.
Substantially superior and more complete was Fear of Fear, a completely forgotten item from the same year (I don’t think it even has its own Wikipedia page). This tells the story of Margot, a severly depressed housewife. Margot’s battle with her anxiety following giving birth to her second child goes through the appropriate cycle: Leonard Cohen albums, valium, affairs, alcohol, until the conclusion. This allows Fassbinder to make his commentary upon the value and lack of understanding of these addictions, but the real villain here is the oppressive society of the Economic Miracle that shuns or judges Margot, from the dismissive doctors to the vile inlaws. “We’re the normal ones!” screeches Irm Hermann, reprising her role from Mother Kusters’. The implication is unavoidable: Margot, whose world literally disintegrates around her, is the sane one, whilst the respectable in-laws, who chastise Margot for almost everything she does, are the repressed psychotic majority. In this sense, Fassbinder predicts both the medicated society and the religious democratic tyranny of numbers-make-right.
A word must be said for Margit Carstensen, who plays, or rather becomes, Margot. Her acting is comprised of quietly confused facials, which are equal parts brilliantly expressive and controlled. She allows Fassbinder to place ambiguity into his close-ups, such as the final shot of her where it is almost impossible to know for sure her reaction to her neighbour’s death. We are left with the disturbing possibility she is happy about it, or is at least gratefully accepting of his self-sacrifice to the demons that haunted them both so that she might live. Or did he merely represent the last traces of her psychosis? The wobbly camera effect, that acted as avatar for her bouts of anxiety, accompanies the credits and works in tandem to split our interpretations. There’s such control and economy with Fassbinder that his style is the perfect environment for this story to take hold.
