Rainer
Werner Fassbinder, 1977
Starring:
Eva Mattes, Angela Schmid, Margit Carstensen, Barbara Sukowa
Mary
is happily married to her husband Stephen and enjoys their life of opulence and
comfort. Her friends are all frustrated with their husbands for a variety of
reasons including boredom and infidelity, and they come to discover that
Stephen is having an affair with a younger woman, Crystal. Though Mary prefers
to remain ignorant, she eventually finds out. Her mother and friends encourage
her to ignore the affair, but her heartbreak includes her to press for divorce,
though she really wants to reunite with Stephen. Soon after, Crystal and
Stephen are married, but Mary finds out something that could ruin Crystal…
Based
on Clare Booth Luce’s 1936 play The Women,
Women in New York is basically the
1970s version of contemporary TV shows like Sex and the City or Gossip
Girl as seen through the lens of the ‘30s. A group of wealthy women’s lives
revolve around their husbands and boyfriends. Between afternoons spent in bed
or in the bath, shopping, drinking alcohol, attending parties, and going to the
hairdresser or manicurist, they gossip and backstab each other in lieu of
independent lives of their own. Though I can understand how critics and
audiences saw this as an attack on women, it is not really a condemnation of
women, but a satire about bourgeois life, a la Effi Briest. The women are despairing, cruel, and useless creatures
as a result of the evils of their repressive, claustrophobic environment. Like pet
birds in gilded cages, they lead lives of extravagant comfort, but profound
isolation.
Women in New York has the distinction of
looking more like a play filmed for TV than a movie, such as Fassbinder’s
earlier works like Das Kaffeehaus, Nora
Helmer, and Bremen Freedom. As
with all three of those, this shares the theme of women up against bourgeois
oppression and, in many ways, it is much like Fear of Fear – about a housewife’s descent into madness – without the
Valium or physical isolation. Mary is certainly alone, but she is also
constantly surrounded by superficial women who claim to be her friends. They
are either too caught up in their own domestic dramas, or too interested in the
monstrous game of ruining the lives of others to be sympathetic or caring.
Though
they are mentioned in every single conversation, there are no men in the film.
This is solely a women’s world, including the principle cast of adult women,
Mary’s strangely boyish daughter, and even the cast of extras, which includes
the women’s staff – maids, cooks, hairdressers, governesses, and shop
attendants. It is a hostile world where a woman’s sole value is place on her
youth and beauty. Like some of Fassbinder’s other films from that period, including
The Stationmaster’s Wife, Chinese
Roulette, and to a certain extent, Satan’s
Brew, this examines the effect of infidelity on a marriage. In Women in New York, issues of infidelity
are further complicated because of the explicit financial benefit of a
marriage. Many of Mary’s friends stay with their cheating husbands because they
are willing to make this trade for increasingly wealthy husbands and
comfortable lives. Mary, the outlier, is too heartbroken to live with this
trade and effectively refuses to prostitute herself.
Curiously,
Mary’s nemesis – the young and beautiful Crystal (played wonderfully by then newcomer Barbara Sukowa) – has begun a relationship
with Mary’s husband Stephen purely because of his sizable bank account. After
Stephen and Mary divorce, she continues a relationship with her lover,
temporarily achieving what none of the other women are able to accomplish:
passionate sexual love on one hand and
wealth and social prominence on the other. Of course, this idyll is ruined not by men, but by other women. The heretofore sensitive and
sympathetic Mary becomes just like her backstabbing, vicious friends and
immediately takes the opportunity to ruin Crystal’s life.
This
soap opera-like cycle of women hating and ruining other women has both comic and
melodramatic elements, but is primarily a social satire. It’s interesting that
classic Hollywood director George Cukor first film a version in 1939, as his
film Gaslight was an influence on
Fassbinder’s Martha, another film
about a woman dealing with the horrors of bourgeois married life. While Women in New York sheds the terror and
hysterical excess of Martha,
Fassbinder leaves a stylistic clue between scenes: close ups on various Edward
Hopper paintings. Believed to be an influence on film noir, Hopper’s seemingly
mundane paintings – such as Nighthawks,
Automat, Rooms by the Sea, and Office
at Night – are portraits of contemporary social isolation and usually
feature a woman looking bereft and alone.
Women in New York is not easy to get
ahold of, but hopefully it will see the light of day on region one DVD sometime
soon. Though I would only recommend it for devoted Fassbinder fans, it is an
oddly prescient, undated work that shows the disturbing cycle of women’s place
in society as wives, mothers, sex objects, and social climbers, figures of
hatred and jealousy, and ultimately victims of their own venomous ambition.
They will go to any length to keep themselves – sisters, daughters, friends,
and rivals – trapped in a social prison that views them as inherently subhuman.
No comments:
Post a Comment