Kusters' Stand

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

MOTHER KUSTERS GOES TO HEAVEN

Directed by RAINER FASSBINDER Screenplay by RAINER FASSBINDER and KURT RAAB

Middleaged, heavyset, slow of step and quiet of speech. Mother Kusters is betrayed by her eyes. Even when she is hurt and puzzled--which is much of the time in this movie--there is something lively and shrewd in them. One senses that in tragic circumstances she has found a challenge worthy of the reserves of fortitude and understanding she has been treasuring up through a dreary little life.

What has happened is that her apparently mild-mannered and totally acceptant husband (we never meet him) has suddenly run amuck at the chemical factory where he has been employed for years. After learning that mass layoffs are going to cost him and hundreds of his mates their jobs, he kills a supervisor and then himself. The lesson that there are no such things as safe niches in the modern world is too bitter for him to absorb.

Home Cooking. Instantly, of course, everyone sets about trying to exploit his family. The press invades the Kusters' modest flat, pretending sympathy while searching for sensation. This they find easily by twisting innocent responses to their queries into a portrait of the late Kusters as a drunken brute.

After that, it is the Communists' turn. They are represented by a husband-wife team of rich dilettantes, whose aim is to turn the widow into a proletarian heroine. Their sheer companionship is helpful, especially since Frau Kusters' son and his pregnant wife flee to Finland to avoid the scandal, while her daughter uses all the sudden notoriety to try to further her tacky career as a cabaret artiste. But the party is not really interested in clearing the Kusters name, just in exploiting it as propaganda. Finally, Mother Kusters goes off with a building janitor, who offers not ideological support but home cooking and a sympathetic ear.

Since that is really all Mother Kusters ever wanted, it makes a nice ending to a nice picture--humane and even-handed in its application of irony and skepticism. Still, one could wish for something more from prolific Director Fassbinder, 31, who has made 27 films and a career for himself as the obligatory German on the international film festival circuit.

Except for the solid, winning craftsmanship of Brigitte Mira in the title role, the picture is at once forced and slapdash. Fassbinder is restless in an uninspired sort of way with his camera--as if he distrusts the holding power of the dialogue and the situations he is covering. And well he might be. Whether from left or right, there is something terribly predictable about the way Mother Kusters' tormentors reveal their duplicity. The film makes all the right comments about what is wrong with a lot of things these days, but it does not speak very artfully about these matters -- except when Actress Mira's eyes are allowed to do its thinking, and its talking, for it.

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