Lili Marleen (1981)

Lili Marleen is far from Fassbinder's best work. It's a decent film, but also a rather unfocused and perhaps a bit uninspired one. The story is about a singer, Willie (fabulous overwrought Hannah Schygulla), whose career is linked to Nazi era sentiments. She is enamored with a Swiss guy involved in the resistance movement. Willie scores a big hit, a favorite among the German troops and among the nazi party elite. The cheesy song is played countless times in the movie and through his hyperbolic sense of melodrama, Fassbinder lets Willie stand for a hapless naivety. 'I only sing'. She's the diva who is known to the German people mostly as the 'woman who sings Lili Marleen. She considers herself to be against the Nazis, but her acting shows nothing of it. Her lover saves Jews and tries to reveal the truth about the nazis. He marries another woman and becomes a celebrated conductor. German soldiers ar heard roaring along to Lili Marleen and Willie perform the song in glossy evening dresses. These are colorful big budget images and I suppose the aim is to present a dreadful image of entertainment as a distortion, a lie or as a manifestation of the kind of skewed self-undertanding that Willie nurses about herself. However, Lili Marleen is not a film that digs out the contrast between surface and brutal reality. That contrast is not at all present here. Glamor, gloss and people's desperation and love-sick disappointment are rendered in the same bizarre and kitschy style. That Fassbinder focuses on a bombastic love story rather than the brutality of war is of course part of the irony of the film. If you will remember something from this film, it is probably Lili Marleen, the song we hear a thousand times in this movie, accompanied by crashing bombs. Even though the effect is striking, this remains a minor film.