Although being made in the 80’s in Germany, this Rainer Werner Fassbinder film feels like a Hollywood Golden Age melodramatic noir. The aesthetics, plot and characters seem like they have been ripped off from that period. That being said, it accomplishes such thing with uneven results, while visually the film is rather stunning, the story lacks a clear focus.

The boring and uneventful life of sports journalist Robert Krohn (Hilmar Thate) will be shaken to its core after a fortuitous encounter with cinematic diva Veronika Voss (Rosel Zech). The intriguing magnetism of the former movie star, whose career thrived during the Nazi era, will hypnotise Robert into sacrificing it all for her while swallowing him into her tormented world full of deception.

The most obvious element of this film is its anachronic feel compared to the place and moment in time in which it was made. You would never expect an 80’s Western German movie to feel so much as a 40’s/50’s Hollywood film as this one does. But the fact is that Fassbinder perfectly captures that era of filmmaking in his story set in Munich in 1955. Visually-speaking, the black-and-white, with special attention to the fantastic whites used in the office of Dr. Katz (Annemarie Düringer), and its framing angles are reminiscent of that period. That element combined with the music used, a combination of a melancholic string-heavy score with gloomier versions of popular and traditional American songs, gives the perfect noirish mood to the story. But, lastly, there is one other element that is clearly inspired by the classic film noirs, and that is the characters in the story: a non-professional (police or detective) proceeding with an investigation, this time being a journalist; a group of shady secondary characters with bad intentions; and finally the femme fatale, the erratic, unstable and “Norma Desmondesque” Veronika (which was inspired in the real-life actress Sybille Schmitz) perfectly played by Rosel Zech.

But not everything is a rip-off. Actually, there are some very characteristic techniques that set this film enough apart from its influences making it fairly singular. Elements such as its lighting, which is very radical with some scenes having very strong flashes of light directed to the lens minimising what we are able to see in the screen, or other scenes in which reflections of light are constantly moving over our characters or the rooms they are in (later on, we would see that some of these supposedly standard rooms are actually decorated with a disco ball!). Or also the overuse of flashbacks, a traditional technique in noirs but which we will find overexploited in this movie until even becoming a structural thing on how the finale is presented.

Another element with which Fassbinder tries to play but without as much success as the previously mentioned is the plot and narrative of the film as a whole. While we indeed seemingly have all the ingredients for a film noir, the truth is that the mystery element does not get introduced until quite late in the film. The first half of it tries to be more of a melodrama but the truth is that the love affair between the two main characters nor its impact on Robert’s relationship with his actual partner (who knows about Robert’s relationship with Veronika) never seems completely believable. It also feels like we are lacking much of the backstory for the character of Veronika, which could have been solved throughout the use of more incisive and explanatory flashbacks, to understand her public demise and personal down spiral.

One other smaller aspect that feels too corny and out of place with the story is the use of PowerPoint-like transitions. While the lighting design and the flashback use felt like a nice addition to the traditional style of film noir, this other element albeit being minimal results distractive and mood breaking as you may get a weirdly animated cut and transition after a supposedly dramatic scene which consequently sets your attention and involvement completely off.

What we end up getting is a more experimental film than it seems by Fassbinder. While it for sure uses film noir as a template, the fact is that tries to play with the form visually and story wise with more success than error although not flawlessly. That experimental element is what makes this movie most worthy of a watch, because if we guide ourselves by the plot or even acting, we can find more interesting and entertaining results going to the original film noirs and melodramas of Billy Wilder or Douglas Sirk respectively.