Word: plot
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...plot is straightforward. Professor Paul Ballard and his student Beth Sieverdsen have an affair, but a tragic accident separates the two for more than two decades. Unbeknownst to Ballard, Beth bears the couple's daughter and gives her up for adoption. Through this daughter, Ballard and Beth are eventually reunited...
...film also suffers from being way too long, clocking in at two hours and 20 minutes (including a pointless 15-minute side plot that wastes the great Delroy Lindo in a clumsily caricatured role). Whenever the film begins to drag--which is pretty much whenever Pacino is off screen for more than ten minutes--Hackford throws in some nudity. Pacino excepted, nearly all the main characters get to run around at least once in their birthday suits...
...spite of its admittedly imposing length, Berlin Alexanderplatz manages to maintain an audience's attention, mainly by presenting a superbly crafted plot and highly symbolic cinematography. The film, composed of 13 parts and an epilogue, details Biberkopf's unsuccessful attempts to lead an honest and "decent" life following his release. It is simultaneously a story of failed and successful relationships and occupations, flirtations with Nazi sentiments, dealings with villainous small-time gangsters and bouts with alcoholism and insanity...
...would presume that, in any film of this length, a certain degree of repetition of plot developments and themes is inevitable. In fact, since Berlin Alexanderplatz deals as much with psychological devastation as it does with romance and criminal intrigue, it is to be expected that the protagonist should, in proper Freudian fashion, relive certain events of his life over and over again, seeking control over events otherwise relegated to the unchangeable past. Fassbinder brutally exploits the technique of flashback in scenes in which Biberkopf recalls the murder of his girlfriend. Fassbinder offers different voice-overs in each reenactment, which...
...some cases Fassbinder's commentary succeeds in placing the events of the film in a broader historical context, offering statistics describing unemployment and death within 1920s Germany, or metaphors relating earlier events to the action currently taking place. In other situations, though, the statements are so unrelated to the plot that they degenerate into non sequiturs, eliciting only confused laughter from the audience. Many of Fassbinder's visual and aural techniques also fail precisely because they try so hard to be profound and meaningful: one can't help but wonder, for instance, whether there is supposed to be some deeper...