Lola (1981 film)

Lola is a 1981 West German satirical drama directed by Rainer Werner Fassbinder, starring Barbara Sukowa as a cabaret singer and prostitute who schemes to rise into respectable society in the West Germany of 1957. It is the final film, in story chronology the last film, of Fassbinder's BRD Trilogy on the postwar Federal Republic, alongside The Marriage of Maria Braun (1979) and Veronika Voss (1982), and it is a free adaptation of Heinrich Mann's 1905 novel Professor Unrat, the source also of Josef von Sternberg's The Blue Angel.^{1 • 2 • 12}

Production

Fassbinder wrote the film with Peter Märthesheimer and Pea Fröhlich as a loose adaptation of Professor Unrat, so loose that, as one Spanish-language study notes, he left little of the novel in place.¹ The film was produced by Rialto-Film of Berlin with Trio-Film of Duisburg and Westdeutscher Rundfunk (WDR), with Horst Wendlandt as producer, at a cost of 3.5 million marks over a 30-day shoot in April and May 1981.¹ Xaver Schwarzenberger shot it in color on 35 mm at a 1.66:1 ratio; Juliane Lorenz edited, Peer Raben wrote the music, and the art direction was credited to Raúl Gimenez and Udo Kier, with Rolf Zehetbauer also credited as production designer.^{1 • 3} The film is dedicated to the filmmaker Alexander Kluge.¹

The trilogy label came late. It was only during the making of Lola that Fassbinder recognized the story of economic reconstruction and corruption, centered on a woman embodying the spirit of her age, as a thematic match to his earlier The Marriage of Maria Braun, and he decided to make the two films, with the then-unrealized Veronika Voss, an after-the-fact trilogy about West Germany reasserting itself from the rubble of war.² Because Lola is set in 1957, a decade after Maria Braun, room was left for a story between them.²

Style and themes

Color carries the film's argument. Schwarzenberger shot Lola in saturated, artificial hues that mimic Hollywood Technicolor, and the gap between that glowing style and the grainier West German stock of the period gives the film what one commentator calls a paradoxical beauty, both spectacular and toxic.² The chromatic scheme is built on red and blue: red for Lola, desire, and rebellion; blue for the Prussian von Bohm, reason, and order, a composition the critic Yann Lardeau described as the alliance of water and fire.¹ Lola is defined throughout by shades of hot red, from the pink of the opening credits to her cherry-red stage and red sports car.²

Thematically, the film examines how a society absorbs and assimilates its dissidents. Von Bohm, an old-fashioned aristocrat from the East representing a shattered humanist Germany, is corrupted, first by purchase and then by marriage, into complicity with a new moneyed class represented by Schuckert, the capital of tomorrow building new structures on the ruins of war.¹ Fassbinder described the years the film depicts as among the most amoral Germany had known, a tacitly accepted amorality in which reconstruction could proceed only by ignoring its losses.¹ Critics have read the prostitution metaphor, drawn from early Godard, as extending to the whole city: in a world where everything and everyone is for sale, the women who sell their bodies are not the only whores in the story.^{6 • 7}

The film's relation to its source is a deliberate misreading. A scholarly study by Talya Alon-Altman of Bar-Ilan University examines Lola through a Bloomian frame as Fassbinder's 'misreading' of von Sternberg's Der blaue Engel (1931), itself based on Mann's Professor Unrat (1905), arguing that Fassbinder's engagement with German cinematic heritage helped make his films a face of the new Germany.⁸ Criterion describes the film as an homage to The Blue Angel and a satirical tribute to capitalism.³

Reception and legacy

At the 1982 Deutscher Filmpreis, the film won Best Actor for Armin Mueller-Stahl, Best Actress for Barbara Sukowa, and a Silver Ribbon as a special mention for the film itself.¹ Among the three BRD films, Lola has been described as the black sheep, enjoying neither the commercial success of Maria Braun nor the critical reputation of Veronika Voss.² It nonetheless entered the standard canon: it appears in Halliwell's Top 1000 at number 161, in The Criterion Collection list at 249, and in The New York Times's Book of Movies at 486.⁹ The Criterion Collection released it on Blu-ray as Spine #206 within its BRD Trilogy box set, and it streams on the Criterion Channel.^{3 • 10} The German Film Awards trophy, the "Lola", takes its name from this film.¹¹

References

1. Obra fílmica: Lola, Fassbindercineasta
2. Corruption Under the Rainbow: Fassbinder's LOLA, UW–Madison Cinematheque (Tim Brayton, 2018)
3. Lola (1981), The Criterion Collection
4. Lola, filmportal.de
5. Lola, Cineuropa
6. LOLA, Dennis Schwartz Reviews
7. Lola (1981) film review, Time Out
8. Talya Alon-Altman, "Cinematic ghosts: Reiner Werner Fassbinder and the German cinematic heritage", Studies in European Cinema 19(4), 2022
9. Lola (1981), iCheckMovies
10. Lola streaming, JustWatch
11. Lola (1981), Flicks
12. Veronika Voss

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026

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