Mother Küsters Goes to Heaven (1975)

DIRECTOR(S): Rainer Werner Fassbinder SCREENPLAY: Rainer Werner Fassbinder CAST: Brigitte Mira, Ingrid Caven, Armin Meler, Irm Hermann, Karlheinz Böhm, Anita Bucher, DISTRIBUTOR: New Yorker Films

If Ali: Fear Eats the Soul was a direct exploration of a society plagued by myopic racism, then there's no question that Rainer Werner Fassbinder's 1975 Mother Küsters Goes to Heaven is its political counterpart. The film centers on Emma Küsters (Mira), an elderly woman who learns that her husband Hermann (a tire-factory worker for twenty years) has killed his supervisor and then committed suicide; the reasons are unknown, and one of the film's masterstrokes is in never outwardly professing the reasons for her husband's death. The question that emerges is rather simple: was her husband's death the work of a lone, horrible man or was it the work of a lone revolutionary who, after hearing layoff announcements, saw no other option but to fight?

The brilliance of Fassbinder's film is precisely in the two-sided approach: in the first part of the film, yellow journalists exploit Mother Küsters, painting her husband, indeed, as a horrible family-man with a temper. Rather unexpectedly, however--and quite hilariously--Fassbinder's political tenets emerge through two wealthy, bourgeois Communists (Böhm and Carstensen)who believe Küsters's husband's death was political, that he was a lone revolutionary and a victim of capitalism. To add to the political scheme, after being disillusioned with the two wealthy communists who believe they must put the upcoming election above her husband's case, Mother Küsters is eventually swayed by a young Anarchist who criticizes the left-wing for not doing anything. In the midst of all of the emerging political tension, Fassbinder never answers the question of what really happened to the elderly widow's husband.

Mother Küsters Goes to Heaven, like Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, is not subtle; the didactic quality, which I believe emerges somewhat from Fassbinder's theatrical work and the specificity of his mise-en-scene, is just as much present here as it was in his previous films. What is masterful about Mother Küsters Goes to Heaven, however, very much like Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, is its canny depiction of the petty bourgeois political climate. In its didacticism, Fassbinder's criticism is pitch-perfect.