Fontane Effi Briest (1974)
Fontane Effi Briest (1974)
A Film by Rainer Werner Fassbinder
BDRip 720p | MKV | 992 x 720 | x264 @ 5256 Kbps | 140 min | 5,74 Gb
Audio: German FLAC 1.0 @ 309 Kbps | Subs: English (embedded in MKV)
Genre: Art-house, Drama
A Film by Rainer Werner Fassbinder
BDRip 720p | MKV | 992 x 720 | x264 @ 5256 Kbps | 140 min | 5,74 Gb
Audio: German FLAC 1.0 @ 309 Kbps | Subs: English (embedded in MKV)
Genre: Art-house, Drama
In the nineteenth century, seventeen year old Effi Briest is married to the older Baron von Instetten and moves into a house, that she believes has a ghost, in a small isolated Baltic town. She soon bears a daughter, Annie, and hires the lapsed Catholic Roswitha to look after her. Effi is lonely when her husband is away on business, so she spends time riding and walking along the shore with Major Crampas. Instetten is promoted to Ministerial Councillor and the family moves to Berlin, where Effi enjoys the social life. Six years later, the Baron is given letters from Crampas to Effi that convince him that they had an affair. He feels obliged to challenge Crampas to a duel and banish Effi from the house.
This film has everything one could ask for: astonishing visual intelligence and imagination, wonderfully evocative, impeccably composed images that draw on silent cinema and painting, all perfectly adapted to the very moving story being told, and the period/milieu in which it unfolds: Effie Briest is presented as enclosed in the many different spaces (most of them - especially the interiors - saturated with stifling formality, social rectitude and conformity) through which she moves and in which she lives, or tries to live (the bird in the cage being a transparent symbol of all this). Quite simply, Fassbinder knows - knew - what "mise en scene" really means. The passage of time is brilliantly handled (through, for example, the use of the fade to white, intertitles and a moving voice-over narration), and the cast is flawless, as well as being flawlessly directed. A film of immense dignity and power, yet it somehow remains understated…
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Fontane Effi Briest (1974)
Fontane Effi Briest (1974)
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