When 17-year-old Effi Briest marries the elderly Baron von Instetten, she moves to a small, isolated Baltic town and a house that she fears is haunted. Starved for companionship, Effi begins a friendship with Major Crampas, a charismatic womanizer.
Cinematography
Black-and-white that makes every room feel like a coffin.
Acting
Schygulla's face does what the script leaves unsaid.
Direction
Fassbinder's Brechtian distance somehow makes it hurt more.
Director
Rainer Werner Fassbinder
Trivia, insights & behind the scenes
Fassbinder shot this in just 28 days while financing his own cocaine habit, because of course he did.
This is Fontane's novel filtered through New German Cinema: the Bismarck era reimagined as critique of 1970s bourgeois marriage.
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