Video Americain

Review

Mira is outstanding as Mother Küsters, an older woman whose sedate, ordinary life is thrown into turmoil when her husband goes mad at work, killing the paymaster, and then committing suicide. As she struggles to understand what happened to her husband, the emotional poverty of her life is revealed in her casual comments regarding her husband's lack of communication, her daughter's ability to turn the media attention to career advantage and her son's inability to counter his wife's desire to distance herself from the embarrassment. As the media vultures descend, the facts of her prosaic life are twisted and sensationalized to sell papers. Mira's entirely believable performance and Fassbinder's unerring cynical eye deliver a powerful treatise on the human propensity toward exploitation. (German with English subtitles)