That was an excellent one.

Plot so thin, it passes unnoticed.

Bad Acting and worse Bad Screenplay

This movie tries so hard to be funny, yet it falls flat every time. Just another example of recycled ideas repackaged with women in an attempt to appeal to a certain audience.

I consider Rainer Werner Fassbinder to be the single most overrated director of all times. I have desperately tried to understand what all the fuss is about when most of his movies seem like movie Experiments gone badly wrong. Effi Briest is at least an accomplished movie with a unique style, although at 2 hours 15 minutes it's pretty slow and overly long.Fassbinder being an eccentric artiste, couldn't just use the title of the novel but came up with a monstrous title (which the IMDb spellchecker doesn't allow me to quote here) that doesn't make much sense in German, but seems to give the movie a Marxist twist (it alludes to "many know their possibilities and requirements but chose to support the ruling system"). The title is usually mercifully shortened to just "Fontane Effi Briest".At the time, the sound recording of films was still a considerable technical problem, so that the entire film was dubbed (the voices and partially also the background noises were re-recorded in a studio and added to the film in post-production). The dubbing was done very meticulously so that the voices are in perfect synchronicity with the lip movements. The voices are in several cases not of the actual actors, for example Eva Mathes was dubbed by another actress, and voiced yet another actress). This gives the film a touch of artificiality and a sense of heightened reality, which goes well with the slow pace of the story.So, for a Fassbinder, it's a surprisingly watchable movie. At the same time, there is no narration, no tension, nothing is building up to anything. It's love it and sit through it, or switch off the video.Interestingly, Fassbinder also has no intention of putting a new angle on the jaded story of the romantic girl falling victim to an uncaring world. I would love to see Effi as a competent woman trying to make her own rules, or even as a femme fatale for a change.

Effie is a young maiden who marries a Baron and talks about ghosts a lot. Effie Briest is in black and white, and its by Fassbinder. Beyond that, I just didn't like it. The characters are cold and distant, they move like statues and speak slowly as in a Dreyer film. The narrative techniques create a literacy atmosphere, fading to white, having brief title cards, and a narrator (voiced by Fassbinder) who interferes long after when he was needed, keeping us at a distance. Its a nice looking film, gorgeous in black and white, often like a painting of 18th Century characters standing on beaches or in drawing rooms. It doesn't remind me of Sirk specifically, aside from the few shots in mirrors and the overly composed shots. There's no histrionics, and hardly any music; melo in melodrama means music. The scenes on the beach where the narrator talks for minutes while we watch the characters from a mid-shot are either meant to be funny or they don't work at all, I can't decide. After watching some Ingmar Bergman films, the massive lack of humanity in this Fassbinder film makes it feel totally empty to me.

Fassbinder's Effie Briest is a tremendous film. it is not an 'adaptation' of the book. it is much more complicated than that. the title as it appears in the film is:Fontane // Effie Briest // oderthen followed by a long quotation in the next frame. the word 'oder' (or) works as a hinge holding the first title onto its meaning (erklarung). the whole of Fontane's book is framed within the title. and the film is a meditation on the limits of enframement. mirrors are everywhere, doubling and re-doubling the images and framings. to anyone that thinks the camera-work is sub par was obviously not paying attention. the execution of some of these scenes is unsurpassed by anyone.the film consists of several different layers. there are inter titles, narration (direct quotations from Fontane), and then dialog. this would be the three orders of representation. then there are the layers of sense. as an example take the figure of Effie Briest. she is never a unified subject that we can refer to as an individual. she is the contested site of a number of different forces in a number of fields of discourse. the most obvious evidence of this is the contestation of the name: Effie. Effie Briest? Effie Von Instetten? the film is about this change. and the possibilities of refusal. what would it be to have ones own name and not the name of an other? she cannot. or as her father (who is always called by the signifier 'Briest') continually says 'Das ist ein zu weites Feld'. he pronounces the limits of thought in its foreclosure. it is always a command and always ends the dialog: there is nothing left to say on this subject because we CANNOT think THAT (the repressed idea, which reveals itself as thinkable through the fathers disavowal of its thinkability).

When reviewing an ordinary film (like Jurassic Park) It is customary to note if the film is not particularly "cinematic". This would then mean that the film in question wouldn't have flashy tracking shots, groovy camera angles, fast paced editing and so on. If these are considered to be good qualities in a film then Effi Briest surely is a bad film.But what if from the beginning the film was meant to be like this? Fassbinder has chosen to hide his work in order to bring forth the original book Effi Briest is based on. To do an adaptation of a text he obviously liked a lot can't have been an easy task to a filmmaker who never relied on existing models of filmmaking. Considering that, one must view Effi Briest as an attempt to create a film as faithful as possible to the original.The result, however, is not alltogether satisfying because most of us will interpret it through a framework of "watching a film". And it must be noted that as a film Effi Briest is slowgoing, static (as is to be expected) and dramatically flat. This could be perhaps a result of a Brechtian device of Fassbinder's to prevent the audience from sinking into the plot (which in itself would be a fine starting point for a soap)but what difference does it make if the film is unwatchable.