When 17-year-old Effi Briest (Hanna Schygulla) marries the elderly Baron von Instetten (Wolfgang Schenck), she moves to a small, isolated Baltic town and a house that she fears is haunted. Because of her husband’s constant traveling, Effi finds companionship with Major Crampas (Ulli Lommel), a charismatic womanizer. Several years later, details about the relationship between Effi and Crampas come to light, with disastrous consequences for her marriage. Adapted from German author Theodor Fontane’s 1894 novel of the same name.
Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s film begins with young Effi Briest (Hanna Schygulla) recounting how her mother, though in love with a young man, married an older one with an established position. That young man–now older and well-off–comes back to their town and asks for Effi’s hand in marriage, which her parents grant. But gradually her husband’s aloof behavior leads her into an affair with a handsome soldier–a brief affair, but one that comes back to haunt Effi when she thinks she’s left it far behind. The gorgeous black-and-white cinematography of “Effi Briest” captures the stark, stratified world of Effi’s life; Schygulla’s delicate performance expresses her sad and tender heart. Though the movie is perhaps too tied to the slow rhythms of the novel from which it was adapted, its elegant style and meticulous analysis of a rigid and hypocritical society has won great acclaim. “–Bret Fetzer”
The setting is a handsome old country house outside Berlin in the 1890’s, the home of a well-to-do upper-middle-class businessman, his wife and their seventeen-year-old daughter, Effi Briest. Effi, as played by the enchanting Hanna Schygulla, is all sunlit curls and radiant beauty, a combination of naiveté, native intelligence, forthrightness, and willful self-interest. The film is composed of short scenes, some almost subliminal, often separated by fades to a white that suggest the empty space on a page at the end of a chapter. Each member of the cast is superb, though Miss Schygulla is stunning. – NYT
In black & white.
In German with English subtitles.
Starring Hanna Schygulla, Wolfgang Schenck, Ulli Lommel, Karlheinz Böhm, Irm Hermann.