Martha

Director: Rainer Werner Fassbinder

1974 / 116min / Digital

Margit Carstensen plays the title role, a brittle, beautiful thirtysomething virgin whose life is upended when her father drops dead at her side on a Roman vacation and she subsequently meets a German bachelor, Helmut (Karlheinz Böhm), outside of the German embassy. Married back in the Heimat, Helmut and Martha embark on a sado-masochistic program of “education,” which Fassbinder slyly suggests is in no way exceptionally perverse but rather replicates the dynamics of a typical bourgeois marriage in a sharper key. A blistering black comedy in high baroque style.