Also this issue: Junk Bonds In The Safety of Objects, stuff binds people together. -Cindy Fuchs Sing a Song of Struggle Lee Hirsch talks about his 10 years documenting African freedom songs. -Sam Adams Dogme Dog Open Hearts breaks the vow and twists your arm. -Sam Adams New Continuing Repertory Film Showtimes

March 6-12, 2003

screen picks

by Sam Adams

Fassbinder, Week Two (Fri.-Thu., March 7-13, $5.50-$8, Ritz at the Bourse, Fourth and Ranstead, 215-925-7900) The Ritz has developed a habit of cherry-picking traveling retrospectives, taking, for example, only the Apu films from the Satyajit Ray series, or Jules and Jim and a handful of Antoine Doinel films from the comprehensive Truffaut package. Normally, this vitiates altogether the purpose of retrospectives, which should offer the opportunity to revisit a filmmaker's best-known works in the light of his lesser ones. In Fassbinder's case, though, even his best-known movies aren't that well-known any more, and the Ritz's trio of films -- The Marriage of Maria Braun, Ali/Fear Eats the Soul and The Merchant of Four Seasons -- meshes nicely with those on view at other venues.

Fear Eats the Soul, screening Wednesday and Thursday, is in many respects the pivotal film in Fassbinder's long filmography, marking the transition from Brechtian principles to Sirkian ones. The contrast to Fassbinder's early films could hardly be more stark; fear traffics in bold colors and melodramatic situations, a far cry from the rough-hewn aesthetics and angst-filled pauses of a movie like Beware of a Holy Whore. After helping organize a retrospective of German expatriate Douglas Sirk's Hollywood melodramas, Fassbinder determined to find a less aggressive -- or at least more subversively confrontational -- way of getting under an audience's skin. The outlines of Fear Eats the Soul's plot could come out of a Stanley Kramer movie from the 1950s; widow falls for young immigrant man, and their love is challenged by a society too blind to see past the color of their skins. That Emmi, Brigitte Mira's bourgeois ex-housewife, is several decades older than Ali, El Hedi ben Salem's Moroccan laborer, is just Fassbinder's way of upping the ante. The film serves as a withering indictment of German racism and middle-class hypocrisy; the way the hausfraus in Emmi's building none-too-subtly turn against her when she takes Ali as a lover, complaining that she'll have to clean the stairwell because there's too much "dirt," shows Fassbinder's devastating understanding of the way social decorum can mask the ugliest of sentiments. The shot of Emmi eating lunch alone in the stairwell, abandoned by her former friends, is pure heartbreak, composed with a Sirkian eye for color and frame. Fassbinder consistently uses frames within the frame -- windows, doorways, etc. -- to underline the artificiality of melodrama; bright swaths of primary color only heighten the effect. As in the best of Sirk's films, such self-consciousness draws the audience in rather than repulsing them -- you sign a contract to play by the movie's rules, and bind yourself to it. The film sums itself up with an epigraph that encompasses Fassbinder's views on love: "Happiness is not always funny."

The Marriage of Maria Braun, screening Friday through Sunday, was released in 1979, and brought Fassbinder his greatest international acclaim, although much of it was directed at Hanna Schygulla's performance in the title role. (It was her first movie for Fassbinder in five years.) But like The Merchant of Four Seasons (1972), showing Monday and Tuesday, the movie's plot moves arbitrarily, even if it's not as impatiently edited as Merchant. Merchant is social realism, Marriage a slice of history -- it opens with a nuptial ceremony conducted as Allied bombs shake the walls -- but they both feel somehow unfinished, unsatisfying. Marriage, at least, purports to be a comedy, but it feels more like a director yanking his audience's chain.

Tosca (Sun., March 9, 11 a.m., $10 (includes light brunch); Tue.-Wed., March 11-12, 7:30 p.m., $8.50; Prince Music Theater, 1412 Chestnut St., 215-569-9700, www.princemusictheater.org) To watch Baz Luhrmann's radiant Broadway Bohème, with its widescreen spectacle and coy Brando references, you'd think the movies and opera were a natural fit. But no matter how often Gangs of New York is described as "operatic," the process of actually capturing opera on screen is a difficult one. The debate as to whether or not it's appropriate to expect opera singers to act rages on -- purists, of course, won't accept any vocal deficiencies, no matter how miscast that matronly Carmen might seem -- and while musical theater might accept the occasional sung-spoken syllable, the primacy of music in opera works against the visual equivalent of the aria: the close-up. With Tosca, the late Benoît Jacquot (A Single Girl, Seventh Heaven) eschews spectacle, reducing the set to the barest essentials -- a palace gate here, a suggestive expanse of black space there -- and undermines the illusion even more by mixing footage of the recording sessions for the movie's soundtrack. It's a shocking tactic at first (and the low-grade shots of present-day Italy simply don't work), but when it works, it's like being swept up onstage with the actors -- Robert Alagna's Mario, Angela Cheorghiu's Tosca and Ruggero Raimondi's Scarpia. Though Jacquot, who was in preproduction on a version of Pagliacci when he passed away, claimed no particular interest in opera when he made Tosca, it's probably still for aficionados, but it's doubtful they'll have any problems with it.

Metropolis (Thu., March 6 and Wed., March 12, 4:30 p.m.; Sun., March 9, 2:15 p.m.; Mon., March 10 and 17, 7 p.m.; County Theater, 20 E. State St., Doylestown, 215-345-6789, www.countytheater.org; also $29.95 DVD) The County's spring session kicks off early with a screening of Fritz Lang's jumbled masterpiece, restored to its original splendor and a semblance of its original structure (though over a quarter of the footage is now considered lost). This exemplary restoration, also available on a new DVD, gives the best approximation of Lang's original intent, which is less allegorical than all-encompassing. Hinting at the intended sprawl, this Metropolis may seem less exact, but it's more ambitious and humanist. Kino's DVD includes somewhat patchy commentary as well as fascinating documentation of the film's painstaking restoration.

Mysterious Object at Noon ($24.95 DVD) Crossing the exquisite corpse with a roadside documentary, this curious Thai import tells a story built one piece at a time by random interviewees. Director Apichatpong Weerasethakul apparently provided no more than the premise: a teacher caring for a disabled boy. An impatient passerby gives the story a sci-fi twist (that's where the "mysterious object" comes in) and it continues to spin out of control, or at least close enough that you have to hold on with both hands. More an experimental gesture than a full-fledged work, Mysterious Object is an ideal palate-cleanser for anyone who's grown exasperated with mainstream cinema; when you're done, you might find yourself queuing up for Old School.