In the penultimate film before his untimely death at the age of 37, the enfant terrible of German cinema Rainer Werner Fassbinder dealt with the fate of the German actress Sybilla Schmitz. The character of Veronika Voss Fassbinder created exactly after Schmitz, and he filmed this almost noir-like drama that reminded me a little of his compatriot Billy Wilder’s “Sunset Blvd” in his distinctive, distinctive, unique and wild style. Admittedly, compared to the films he made in the earlier phase, here Fassbinder managed to reconcile somewhat, and “Veronika Voss” brought him probably the biggest award in his short but incredibly rich career, the Golden Bear in Berlin.
Fassbinder’s fascination with the period of Nazism in his country and the hypocrisy of society, which immediately after the war began to pretend that it did not concern them, was also evident in his earlier films. Such was the case with Schmitz. This actress experienced the height of her fame during the Nazi era, when everyone adored her and beat her for being the German Greta Garbo. After the collapse of Nazism, Schimtz was completely rejected and no one wanted to work with her. She was sentenced to rare episodic roles, indulged in drugs and alcohol, was depressed and, due to several suicide attempts, was often hospitalized in psychiatric clinics. In the end, she died in 1955 in Munich at the age of 46 after overdosing on pills, and her death was never fully explained because at the time she was living with a psychiatrist who drugged her with morphine.
That’s how Fassbinder set the plot of his film in Munich in 1955, and blonde Veronika (Rosel Zech) is a failed movie star that no one wants to deal with anymore. By chance, she will meet sports journalist Robert Krohn (Hilmar Thate) and will be completely impressed by the fact that he doesn’t even know who she is. Despite this, Veronika will attract him with her mysterious beauty, and her life story and the fact that the once biggest star today lives in obscurity and is constantly drunk, drugged or on pills, will lead him to try to discover the dark secrets that led to her downfall. That grown-up movie star who looks like Marlene Dietrich in “The Blue Angel” will also get Krohn into serious trouble, and his girlfriend Henrietta, also a journalist, will help him in the investigation.
Fassbinder decided to film this somewhat twisted satire, only seemingly set up so that it seems like a typical melodrama from the fifties, in black and white. So although it is obvious that “Veronika Voss” is a typical Fassbinder film, it is quite stylistically different from most of its predecessors, and it seems as if it partly tried to follow typical Hollywood films from that period. It’s a real shame that this incredibly talented author self-destructed so young and that he didn’t live longer, because it would be interesting to follow in which direction his creativity would develop. Although he shot practically all of his films in a nightmarish state caused by lack of sleep, drugs and alcohol, it is incredible how his vision is evident in practically all of these films. And how everything is meticulously planned down to the last detail, with often kitschy mise-en-scène and famous faces that he regularly used in his films.