BootDigest Such a frustrating disappointment

Ogosmith Each character in this movie — down to the smallest one — is an individual rather than a type, prone to spontaneous changes of mood and sometimes amusing outbursts of pettiness or ill humor.

Delight Yes, absolutely, there is fun to be had, as well as many, many things to go boom, all amid an atmospheric urban jungle.

Billy Ollie Through painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable

Karl Self I consider Rainer Werner Fassbinder to be the single most overrated director of all times. I have desperately tried to understand what all the fuss is about when most of his movies seem like movie Experiments gone badly wrong. Effi Briest is at least an accomplished movie with a unique style, although at 2 hours 15 minutes it's pretty slow and overly long.Fassbinder being an eccentric artiste, couldn't just use the title of the novel but came up with a monstrous title (which the IMDb spellchecker doesn't allow me to quote here) that doesn't make much sense in German, but seems to give the movie a Marxist twist (it alludes to "many know their possibilities and requirements but chose to support the ruling system"). The title is usually mercifully shortened to just "Fontane Effi Briest".At the time, the sound recording of films was still a considerable technical problem, so that the entire film was dubbed (the voices and partially also the background noises were re-recorded in a studio and added to the film in post-production). The dubbing was done very meticulously so that the voices are in perfect synchronicity with the lip movements. The voices are in several cases not of the actual actors, for example Eva Mathes was dubbed by another actress, and voiced yet another actress). This gives the film a touch of artificiality and a sense of heightened reality, which goes well with the slow pace of the story.So, for a Fassbinder, it's a surprisingly watchable movie. At the same time, there is no narration, no tension, nothing is building up to anything. It's love it and sit through it, or switch off the video.Interestingly, Fassbinder also has no intention of putting a new angle on the jaded story of the romantic girl falling victim to an uncaring world. I would love to see Effi as a competent woman trying to make her own rules, or even as a femme fatale for a change.

Ben Parker Effie is a young maiden who marries a Baron and talks about ghosts a lot. Effie Briest is in black and white, and its by Fassbinder. Beyond that, I just didn't like it. The characters are cold and distant, they move like statues and speak slowly as in a Dreyer film. The narrative techniques create a literacy atmosphere, fading to white, having brief title cards, and a narrator (voiced by Fassbinder) who interferes long after when he was needed, keeping us at a distance. Its a nice looking film, gorgeous in black and white, often like a painting of 18th Century characters standing on beaches or in drawing rooms. It doesn't remind me of Sirk specifically, aside from the few shots in mirrors and the overly composed shots. There's no histrionics, and hardly any music; melo in melodrama means music. The scenes on the beach where the narrator talks for minutes while we watch the characters from a mid-shot are either meant to be funny or they don't work at all, I can't decide. After watching some Ingmar Bergman films, the massive lack of humanity in this Fassbinder film makes it feel totally empty to me.

timmy_501 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.

schizolage Fassbinder's Effie Briest is a tremendous film. it is not an 'adaptation' of the book. it is much more complicated than that. the title as it appears in the film is:Fontane // Effie Briest // oderthen followed by a long quotation in the next frame. the word 'oder' (or) works as a hinge holding the first title onto its meaning (erklarung). the whole of Fontane's book is framed within the title. and the film is a meditation on the limits of enframement. mirrors are everywhere, doubling and re-doubling the images and framings. to anyone that thinks the camera-work is sub par was obviously not paying attention. the execution of some of these scenes is unsurpassed by anyone.the film consists of several different layers. there are inter titles, narration (direct quotations from Fontane), and then dialog. this would be the three orders of representation. then there are the layers of sense. as an example take the figure of Effie Briest. she is never a unified subject that we can refer to as an individual. she is the contested site of a number of different forces in a number of fields of discourse. the most obvious evidence of this is the contestation of the name: Effie. Effie Briest? Effie Von Instetten? the film is about this change. and the possibilities of refusal. what would it be to have ones own name and not the name of an other? she cannot. or as her father (who is always called by the signifier 'Briest') continually says 'Das ist ein zu weites Feld'. he pronounces the limits of thought in its foreclosure. it is always a command and always ends the dialog: there is nothing left to say on this subject because we CANNOT think THAT (the repressed idea, which reveals itself as thinkable through the fathers disavowal of its thinkability).