Veronika Voss

(Die Sehnsucht der Veronika Voss). Fassbinder’s Sunset Boulevard, set in 1955, chronicles the demise of a forgotten star of the German cinema of the thirties and forties, as witnessed by a younger man who falls in her thrall. Robert (Hilmar Thate), taciturn sports reporter and secret poet, rescues a drenched mysterious stranger from a downpour and becomes engulfed in her need, which is sexual only on its surface. The former Ufa star and Goebbels protégée Veronika Voss (Rosel Zech) is now the mistress of morphine, administered by a new Führer, a psychiatrist, to take away the pain of the latest national “miracle.” This film of crystal and sepia alternating with shadowless white light looks at Germany’s own Dream Factory—the Nazi cinema and propaganda machine—through its victims who are still trapped in those “good times,” whether through nostalgic fantasies or tattooed numbers on their forearms. “You gave me a lot of happiness,” Veronika tells her shrink and supplier. “I sold it to you,” she is corrected. Memories, as the soundtrack tells us, are made of this.

—Judy Bloch

• Written by Peter Märthesheimer, Pea Fröhlich. Photographed by Xavier Schwarzenberger. With Rosel Zech, Hilmar Thate, Cornelia Froboess, Annemarie Düringer. (104 mins, In German with English subtitles, Color, 35mm, From Janus Films/Criterion Collection)