Munich, 1 9 5 0s. While watching herself in a World War II film in a cinema theater, forgotten actress Veronika Voss leaves and starts crying outside in the rain. A reporter, Robert, offers her an umbrella, and they go on a dinner. Upon finding out Veronika is famous by his press colleague Henriette, Robert starts investigating and finds out Veronika lives in a clinic as a patient of neurologist Dr. Katz who controls her through Veronika’s drug addiction. Veronika gets a small role in a film, but is unable to remember her two lines, and collapses from a nervous breakdown. Dr. Katz persuades Veronika to leave all her estate to Dr. Katz, after which Veronika dies from an overdose of sleeping pills, locked inside her room. Robert cannot prove anything and just leaves the building.
Included in Roger Ebert’s list of Great Movies, the penultimate film by director Reiner Werner Fassbinder before his too early and tragic death, "Veronika Voss" is a darker version of "Sunset Blvd.", depiciting an aging actress suffering from the fact that she passed her prime, unfolding almost as a suicide in slow motion. As is often the case in his movies, Fassbinder overemphasizes the melodramatic aspects of the story a bit too much, but he manages to "expand" the soap opera storyline thanks to several cinematic techniques, dialogues and directorial interventions, upgrading the film into something more. In the opening scenes, the title protagonist Veronika is in the cinema, watching an old World War II film she starred in, in which she plays a role of a drug addicted patient who is controlled and eliminated by a nurse with a syringe, eerily foreshadowing the ending of this film and her own fate. In a further metafilm touch, a short behind-the-scenes flashback appears, depicting Veronika while making this film and embracing her husband-screenwriter, explaining to the director: "You don't understand. It's not only his screenplay, it's also his love that gives me strength".
Returning to the present time of her decay, in which Fassbinder almost gives an allegorical commentary on Germany in disarray as a whole after World War II, Veronika meets a reporter, Robert, who doesn't know how she is. Later, back in his apartment, he gets a phone call picked up by his girlfriend (!) Henrietta, who doesn't seem to mind he sees other women as well, and informs him Veronika invited him for a date. Henrietta just tells Robert: "I guess she doesn't know you, either. She said you were a charming man." Robert, as a symbol for the viewers, begins to naturally explore more and more, and thus the movie reveals several layers in Veronika's life. In another good line, Veronika goes: "When an actress plays a woman who wants to please a man, she tries to be all the women in the world rolled into one". Around 67 minutes into the film, there is a great stylistic scene of a film set, in which the camera is behind a movie camera and a director slowly approaching Veronika on a camera dolly, but as the movie camera stops, the camera even continues approaching Veronika further, beyond the film director, signalling the intention of a film-within-a-film. Not all the ingredients in the film work, though. Some are of lesser quality. For instance, Robert is a too passive character, whereas the ending is simply too rushed, without elaborating more to give weight of what just happened: instead, the tragedy happens too fast and too fleeting, it's almost in the vein of "blink and you'll miss it", as if a scene is missing. Yet, considering Fassbinder's fate was very similar to Voss' own tragedy, the movie seems almost prophetic.
Grade:+++
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