Review of Effi Briest (1974) by Richard D — 16 Jan 2017

Young Effi Briest marries an older man and moves to a small town. It's not a particular happy marriage, and she forms a close friendship with an associate of her husband Major Crampus. Years later, after moving to Berlin, letters surface that lead her husband to believe that there was an illicit affair between them.

A fairly deliberately confounding film, even for Fassbinder. It's told in a fairly oblique style with several key scenes happening off screen, and is interspersed with narration, on screen captions and a lot of novelistic devices.

It's a long film that consists mainly of sets of characters talking in carefully arranged, static shots. Most of these conversations don't really drive the plot. That may sound like I disliked the film, but I was really quite taken with it.