Written and directed by Rainer Werner Fassbinder
“It’s a business of sadists and masochists, and you know which one you are,” says veteran secretary Ida Blankenship to young adwoman Peggy Olson in Mad Men, but the pithy statement about a demanding industry full of difficult people might as well be about the institution of marriage, at least if you ask Rainer Werner Fassbinder, who with Martha fires a broadside at two people’s decision to love each other, through sickness and health, til death do them part.
Martha’s a 31-year old daddy’s girl and a virgin, light on her feet and untethered by life’s expectations. She has a job she enjoys, doesn’t feel in a rush to marry some guy, despite the world telling her to, and her lips seem naturally to part to reveal her many teeth in a great big smile. Her father’s an abusive and cold man, but life, in Martha’s limited view, is still good when you’re young, rich, and under papa’s protection.
Then her father dies, and a patriarch from hell steps in.
Rainer Werner Fassbinder was married for two years, from 1970 to 1972, and released in 1974, Martha is a scathing satire of holy matrimony written by someone who clearly thinks it only has the potential for restriction, emotional torment, suffocating control, and downright abuse. A story of a sadist and a masochist, it is perverse, surreal, provocative, making the high notes wicked, but the rest a repetitive tedium.
It’s a two-character lopsided contest: Margit Carstensen, with her big mouth and doleful eyes seems built for this melodrama, as she must first sparkle with youthful joy and later wail with emotional agony as she’s ground to dust. Carstensen has an airiness to her, and while her overacting is a melodrama requisite, how she withers as Martha is devastating to observe.
As Helmut, Karlheinz Böhm is a terror hiding in plain sight. His straight brow gives him the focused stare of a predator, and Böhm even moves with the slow deliberation of someone who stalks their prey. Böhm first unnerves you with his quiet and observing disposition and when he unleashes his physicality on Martha, it resembles that of a snake, his body cracking like a whip and his hands turning into vices. Never has anyone looked more like an icy psychopath politely turning someone else into a doormat.
Despite the farcical exaggeration, our language and awareness surrounding the toxic power dynamics that can exist between partners have grown so much that the more subtle aggressions are what stand out beyond the more overt abuses Martha endures. A scene where Martha spends a catastrophic afternoon in the sun on Helmut’s insistence packs a punch, but his constant undermining of Martha’s agency, undoing it bit by bit, through a weaponization of love’s good faith, is honestly more chilling.
There are realistic undercurrents to be found in Fassbinder’s excoriation of marriage, but the one-note satirical lashings lose their sting over time. High points can make up for them, and along the middle, where things only go one way, they do so slowly. While you ought to be watching through your fingers, your hands instead must spring into action to stifle a yawn, and for a movie that’s meant as a perverse horror show with a glint in its eyes, that’s a letdown.
Mikkel Frederiksen 