Effi Briest

A film set in nineteenth-century Prussia. Effi is seventeen. Her family marries her to a man far older, Baron von Innstetten, who once courted her mother and was refused. The couple move to a small town on the Baltic coast. Innstetten is in government service and always travelling; Effi is left alone in a large house. The house is cold, the neighbours keep their distance and a story about a ghost circulates in the town. Effi has a brief affair with an officer. Then they move, years pass and the matter appears closed. Years later Innstetten finds the old letters. Everything he does after that has to do not with feeling but with social rule: he does what must be done and nobody questions it. What the film describes is not a story of adultery but rules working independently of persons, and everyone consenting to it. The form is bound to the text. There are transitions that fade to white between scenes, a narrator reads passages from the novel and the actors look often into mirrors. Hanna Schygulla plays Effi. The source is Theodor Fontane's novel. Rainer Werner Fassbinder directed. An important production for anyone who likes German cinema and literary adaptation. For a viewer expecting an emotional period film, the narrative keeps its distance and is deliberately cold.