Laikals The greatest movie ever made..!

BootDigest Such a frustrating disappointment

StyleSk8r At first rather annoying in its heavy emphasis on reenactments, this movie ultimately proves fascinating, simply because the complicated, highly dramatic tale it tells still almost defies belief.

Nayan Gough A great movie, one of the best of this year. There was a bit of confusion at one point in the plot, but nothing serious.

Bryan Martinez I liked this movie. The cinematography was beautiful and it was very interesting to watch for someone (me) who is very interested in New German Cinema. The only problem is that it's unnecessarily long. I understand the point Fassbinder was trying to make and it came across perfectly fine. I just feel like he went into some much detail to make his point go across. Throughout the film, Maria becomes drastically different people. She's really a lot of things. It's obvious that she is confused about herself. The thing that gets me is that the movie is very meandering. It just goes on and on with something that doesn't have to be so long. It'd be fine if the characters were more likable (like in Pulp Fiction, a film that relies on it's characters) but with this film they really aren't supposed to be likable. Maybe, on a second watch of the film, the whole thing would feel like it passes by faster. But for now, I'd say it's a 7/10. I'd recommend it only if you are curious about the history of cinema or if you're crazy about Fassbender.

Alexandra Garcia (alexxenglish) This is my first Fassbinder film and, as such, I was excited to sink my teeth into this. This was the second film I was assigned to view for my Foreign History of film course and I was initially enchanted by its charming humor and hyperbolic characters. As the film progressed, Maria's character became more and more reductive. She is depicted as hyperssexual and because of this her character is "cold," calloused, and only interested in being her thought-to-be-deceased husband's subservient little wife. Women are written so explicitly simpleminded and only concerned with having a husband to sport around post-war Germany (or right in the thick of it). They lack a substantial superobjective that is independent of the male characters' own objectives.Has some funny and memorable moments, great Maria Braun dialogue, but overall a bit of a mess in terms of sound editing (added for effect, but completely stripping away from particular scenes), writing, and pacing.

Graham Greene The Marriage of Maria Braun (1979) was the first part of director Rainer Werner Fassbinder's celebrated trilogy of films that looked specifically at the period following the end of the Second World War, and in particular, the socio-political and economic re-birth of Germany following the Wirtschaftswunder. All three films in the trilogy look at these situations through the eyes of a strong-willed, arrogant and determined female-protagonist who strives against all odds to achieve the kind of lifestyle that she has always desired, but once she does, finds herself still feeling empty and lacking in spirit. The characters in these films come to represent Fassbinder's own feelings about the Germany of this particular period, whilst simultaneously acting as an allegorical portrayal and deeper interpretation of the qualities and characteristics of the country itself.Fassbinder opens this richly political film, not with a scene of screaming polemic, but with a bust of action and a sense of jarring confusion. Using staccato editing techniques and elaborate visual compositions that obscure and fragment large portions of the frame in much the same way as his earlier films - such as The Merchant of Four Seasons (1972), Fox and his Friends (1974) and Mother Kusters' Trip to Heaven (1975) but with the harsher, more Brechtian inspired sense of deliberate distraction found in later films, like The Third Generation (1979) and In a Year of 13 Moons (1978) - Fassbinder is able to take us completely off guard; creating a misleading sense of what the film might be, whilst simultaneously developing a number of themes and motifs that will reoccur throughout. The scene in question captures the wedding of our central character Maria to the soon-to-be shipped off soldier Herrmann Braun as a procession of falling bombs destroy the small chapel and the surrounding area of their village. It is to this day one of the most startling opening sequences from any of Fassbinder's work; with the war-time iconography, use of ironic, on-screen inter-titles, freeze-frames and the continual punctuation of loud explosions and jarring cuts in the editing, all grabbing our attention right from the off.From this set up, Fassbinder uses the situation to explore the eventual ideas of faith, loyalty and betrayal, incorporating an early subplot in which Maria - who earnestly believes that her husband has been killed in battle - begins a passionate relationship with one of the American G.I.s who hangs out at the bar where she works. The notions that arise from this set up are the same notions and themes that will be fleshed out in the films that would follow; with the external similarities of plot and location being found in the next film, Lola (1981), whilst the internal angst and ideas of loneliness and despair can be found in the final film, Veronika Voss (1982). Following the return of her husband and his subsequent incarceration, Maria begins her odyssey into self-preservation and economic re-birth by exploiting her surroundings and the offers of others - no matter how seemingly suspect - in order to secure herself a more comfortable future that we know is ultimately unattainable.Lola, the second film in the trilogy, which took its inspiration from Josef Von Sternberg's The Blue Angel (1930), would eventually look at how that same sense of opportunism, greed and determination can be used for more selfish reasons, sowing the seeds of tragedy and eventual air of blind exploitation that would come full circle with the third film, Veronika Voss. Veronika Voss exists in very much the same cinematic universe as the two other films that formed the backbone of what would eventually become known as "the BRD trilogy"; though Fassbinder himself had often talked of plans to make more films in a similar vein - analysing post-war German history through to the present day - but was unable to continue the theme due to his untimely death in June of 1982. Regardless, The Marriage of Maria Braun skilfully establishes the ideas that would go towards forming the dramatic nucleus of these two subsequent works, depicting the sense of determination and the sheer triumph of will that went towards rebuilding Germany from the ashes of the Second World War through the eyes of a resolute young woman willing to push her own emotional stability to breaking point in order to secure a better future for her and her incarcerated husband.To me, it is startling to think that Fassbinder could begin something as obviously political and large of scale as the film in question only a few months after having completed the incredibly personal and controversial In a Year of 13 Moons and the similarly controversial but very much satirical The Third Generation; with the entire look, feel and evocative period recreation of The Marriage of Maria Braun seeming light-years away from the harsh, unglamorous and unflinching depictions of late 1970's Frankfurt and Berlin with their various homosexual and pseudo-radical subcultures. There are continual overlapping themes to tie them all together, but at times it really does feel like the work of a completely different filmmaker; almost as if Fassbinder had a shadowy alter-ego who made painfully honest and personal films alongside his more large-scale and popular works. Not to say that this doesn't have its personal moments, and of course, there is still that ending, with its ironic and almost melodramatic mark of devastation and the almost subversive sense of mocking satire that is something that only Fassbinder could pull off.The Marriage of Maria Braun is, without question, one of the highpoint of Fassbinder's all-too brief career and one of the crowning achievements of the once-radical New German Cinema movement. It remains, along with the other two films of the BRD trilogy - a fitting testament to his enormous talent and under-appreciated genius, not only as a director of actors and a communicator of ideas, but as a serious filmmaker with a peerless grasp of editing, design, music and cinematography.

superdood-1 This movie was, as Homer Simpson would have put it, "more boring than church." Maybe I don't understand it well enough, and I thought it started out pretty well, but after (START OF SPOILER) Hermann Braun is sent to jail and Maria starts working/sleeping with her boss it just started to drag, and I struggled to keep awake. Again, maybe it symbolizes something, but the explosion at the end seemed very forced and out of place. (END OF SPOILER). In the end, I fail to see why others think it's so great, as I found it extremely boring. By the way, I did not watch this movie by my own free will, as I was required to see it for a Film class.