Berlin Alexanderplatz (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1980)

I break a rule in reviewing a TV series, but Fassbinder's 14-part telling of Alfred Döblin's novel has more in common with cinema despite its small-screen origins. It has aspirations far beyond the medium's norm in its epic scope, deliberately stagy and hypercoloured scenes, surrealist overtones and self-referential structure. It purports to speak not just about petty criminals in depressed Weimar Berlin, but about the human condition, and to this aim uses portentous obscurantist poetry not just in intermittent cuts to a sage-like narrator but places the words in the mouth of the protagonist himself. It's in turn hypnotically beguiling and absolutely infuriating and often both at the same time.
The story is that of Franz Biberkopf, released from prison after killing his girlfriend in a fit of rage into a city where everyone seems to be jobless or on the make. He's a bear of a man, flickering between joviality and jealous fury, assured worldliness and helpless despair. He's a simpleton and a philosopher. He brags to feeble women and is fed on by unscrupulous men. He is clearly meant to be Everyman, and it's to the credit of Günter Lamprecht's empathic performance that the massive conceit almost works.
Everywoman, on the other hand, gets a raw deal in Fassbinder's Weltanschauung. It's a more thorough reductionism than the usual chauvinist virgin-whore dichotomy: women are simply insane. Each female character flips out in some unfounded way  over the course of the story, even Hanna Schygulla's character, who plays a sort of a tarty big sister to Franz. In the case of Franz's eventual love, the childlike Mieze, the narrator's harping on her sweetness and homely innocence grates almost as much as her twittering repetition of simple lines over and over again.
In the absence of the strong female, the most interesting character besides Franz ends up being the small-time gangster Reinhold, who Franz is helplessly drawn to and whose bitter misanthropy drags Franz to his perdition. Gottfried John plays him as a sneering, stammering lizard of a man seething with a self-loathing he doesn't quite understand. Fassbinder said that he saw himself in the story as a composite of Franz, Reinhold and Mieze, and that comes across clearly when you read about the troubled and contrary director's life.
It's an ordeal of a film with its perverse fixations and wilful unnaturalism, not least in the epilogue, which is an addition to Döblin's story by Fassbinder and consequently the worst of the episodes, being a deranged hallucinatory deconstruction of Biberkopf's whole life in the throes of his eventual madness. It may well make you never watch another of the director's works again. It is also fascinating, and there is no contradiction between the two.

7/10