Synopsis
After a worker kills a superior and commits suicide, each of his family members attempts to forge a path forward in life.
Mother Küsters Goes to Heaven
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Alternative Titles
Mother Küsters’ Trip to Heaven, Maman Küsters s’en va au ciel, Il viaggio in cielo di mamma Kusters, Вознесение Матушки Кюстерс, Mother Küsters Goes to Heaven, Maman Küsters s'en va au ciel, El viaje a la felicidad de mamá Küster, Вознесение матушки Кюстерс, 卡斯特婆婆升天记, Mamã Küster vai para o Céu, 퀴스터스 부인의 천국 여행, Matka Küsters idzie do nieba
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Theatrical
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Germany
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Germany
01 Jul 1975
- Theatrical
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Fassbinder's targets include but are not limited to the media, the radical left, the traditional family, capitalism, and fame. It's like a precisely aimed melodramatic machine gun, mowing down everything about the modern world he could not stand with well crafted scorn. What impresses me about this era, prime era, Fassbinder (which would continue, in my book, until his death) is how he wields emotion in these films. Everything is heightened by his mix of dark and bright colors, and simple close ups give us just enough sympathy to follow the characters down these fucked up paths.
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“Everybody's out for something. Once you realize that, everything is simple.”
Brigitte Mira’s Emma Küsters could almost be an alternate version of her Emmi character from Fear Eats the Soul — they’re both Sirk characters, both genuinely kind widows used/abused and discarded by their families and by society itself. The difference, though, is that, unlike Emmi, Küsters isn’t in a Sirk movie that’s been transposed to West Germany. Instead, she’s in a scathing Fassbinder film, an uncomfortably black comedic look at the way that people and political groups exploit personal tragedies for their own gain.
While Emmi is our ostensible protagonist, the deceased Herman is the real center of the film. We never meet him, but neither does anyone else…
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"Everybody's out for something. Once you realize that, everything is simple."
First things first: it will never stop blowing my mind that Gottfried John went from a photojournalist in this film to James Bond baddie in GoldenEye, while Ingrid Caven graduated from the role of opportunistic chanteuse to one of the Suspiria remake's many witches. Bless them both.
Ideally paired with another of Fassbinder's 1975 films that explores the exploitation of the working class, Fox and His Friends, the drama Mother Küsters Goes to Heaven grants yet another wonderful acting showcase to the star of Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, Brigitte Mira. As the title character, Mrs. Emma Küsters, Mira pours her heart into yet another beleaguered wife and mother,…
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"Thinking? Who thinks nowadays?"
Mother Küsters Goes to Heaven is a bit of a frustrating experience that left me somewhat torn. I really loved most of it, but the film is also somewhat incomplete. Fassbinder originally shot the film with one ending, which he submitted to the Berlin International Film Festival only to have the film banned and screened instead at the more "fringe" Berlin Forum, where it "created more furore in Germany than any of his previous films," according to film festival programmer Tony Rayns.
Fassbinder was forced to shoot a new ending, a happy ending, which, in spite of its apparent light-heartedness, is deeply ironic and clearly exhibits Fassbinder's frustration with the situation. Watching the film…
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Absurdly humorous and scathing (reminded me of Buñuel in that regard), but distinctly Fassbinder warped melodrama with crosshairs on every facet of society that would exploit or suppress the individual. Fun!
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An exploitation film...
In Thousands of Mirrors, Ian Penman's study-cum-memoir of going to see Rainer Werner Fassbinder films, the author offers up a neat-sounding appraisal of the director: a theorist of poisons not cures.
Whether art needs to offer a neat way out, or merely one of many routes - or none at all - doesn't trouble the tart roundedness of the statement. And true it is that Fassbinder's films are not there to put a superficial spring in your step. What they are for is social barometrics and, still decades later, stylised aperçus upon the human condition. West Germany may be no more, but the universalisms of Man alienated somewhere between frustrated love and liberal cruelty continues apace. Which…
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Mother Küsters becomes an obvious target for everyone around her because of her basic morality which allows her to be persuaded. She is open to instruction and is unfortunately surrounded by parasitic entities be it her family who resents her presence and eventually disowns her or the communist who pretend to have her best interest at heart provided she joins their cause. In the end their actions are opposite to their words the only person she feels she can rely on, her husband, has killed himself at work.
In the opening scene right before Mother Küsters is told of her husband's murder-suicide she has this mild argument with her daughter in law about preparing sausage, the daughter in law going…
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crazy how Rainer Werner Fassbinder literally predicted leftist infighting on Twitter
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Uses negative space in the wide-open 1.37:1 frame to brilliant effect, giving simple domestic spaces the gaping feeling of halls in medieval castles. Or dungeons, more to the point. It's a terrific example of Fassbinder's skill for using framing and blocking to do nearly all the work of telling us who the characters are and how they relate to each other and themselves, only a hair or two behind Petra von Kant in that respect, if you asked me.
The story is an interesting swerve for the director: a political-realist fable rather than any sort of melodrama, and it's not always quite a great fit; the film perpetually seems uncertain how much it wants to take left-wing activism seriously, versus…
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This but left-wing.
Feels like a more developed and Sirkian take on his earlier Why Does Herr R. Run Amok?
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“Mother Küsters Goes to Heaven” is a political melodrama and satire with many targets, including dysfunctional families, the inhumanity of capitalism, the careless sensationalism of the media, and the division and ineffectiveness of the political left. Communists are portrayed as passive armchair activists and anarchists as short-sighted, quick-tempered terrorists. In general, everyone Mrs. Küsters comes in contact with is a selfish opportunist who exploits her grief for their own agenda, while all she wants is simply getting justice for her dead husband. Brigitte Mira delivers what probably is her second-most heart-wrenching performance in a Fassbinder film, and she gets strong support from Irm Hermann, Ingrid Caven, Margit Carstensen, Karlheinz Böhm, Armin Meier, and Gottfried John. “Mother Küsters Goes to Heaven” is a smart and affecting film that voices Fassbinder´s frustration with the status quo in Germany.
