Cinema: Bund Wagon

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LILI MARLEEN

Directed by Rainer Werner Fassbinder Screenplay by Manfred Purzer, Joshua Sinclair and Rainer Werner Fassbinder

When she started, in Switzerland in the mid-1930s, she was Just a Gigolette, one of Seven Beauties singing in a Cabaret. Then Lale Andersen stumbled onto a discarded piece of Great War schmaltz, a soldier's love song called Lili Marleen. As German soldiers swarmed over the globe in 1939, they carried this song with them. Lale became a star—for a time, the darling of the Third Reich —and Lili Marleen the song of her life.

This is the movie version, and it cleaves as tenaciously to the facts as any star biopic from Hollywood's heady days. Fassbinder built his reputation with films (The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant, The Marriage of Maria Braun) that played high-voltage melodrama as deadpan farce; here he has turned Lale's tale into what Hanna Schygulla, who impersonates her in the film, calls "a Nazi fairy tale." As the new star gorges on her celebrity, making love to her mirror image in a palatial white bedroom, her countrymen starve to win the war and her country's enemies are paraded to death. Told that her song reaches 6 million German soldiers every night, she muses: "Six million? I don't believe it. No, not 6 million."

Fassbinder means to contrast death on the Russian front and in the refugee camps (shot in the harsh, primary colors of the Fauves) with life on cloud nine of the Nazi fantasy (shown in the pastel soft-focus of the later Doris Day films). Indeed, one can find hints of the director's auto biography: a contrast between his pinchpenny past and his recent, glossier work. He appears here in the role of a "secret Resistance fighter"—against the Nazis on-screen and the moneymen of the new German cinema. But he puts up too little resistance to the lures of an international cast (including Giancarlo Giannini as a Swiss Jew, and Mel Ferrer as his father!), a multilingual film (the principals appear to be speaking English, which has been dubbed into German and subtitled back into English) and a $5 million budget. Once, churning out more than 30 films before his 30th birthday, Fassbinder was called the movies' Wunderkind. At 35, he is Kind no longer. And, on the evidence of Lili Marleen's empty excesses, it's no wonder. —By Richard Corliss