“Social comedy doesn’t get any nastier than “Martha,” Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s pitch-black satire of bourgeois marriage and patriarchal dominance in modern Germany. The 1974 film, follows a pathetically obedient wife on her path to destruction at the hands of a sadistic husband.
In the movie’s opening scene, Martha (Margit Carstensen) witnesses the death from a heart attack of her cold, much-adored father while they are touring Rome. Returning to Germany, she finds her mother celebrating the death by chasing down Valium with swigs from a whisky bottle. Liberated at last, her mother soon ends up in a mental institution. Martha turns down a marriage proposal from her boss at a research library and instead weds Helmut Salomon (Karlheinz Bohm), a civil engineer who mauls her violently when they first meet, at a formal dinner party. One of the film’s most audacious set pieces, this party is staged like a grotesque state funeral, at which the guests are nearly smothered under banks of flowers.
Sumptuously photographed in a style that parodies old-time Technicolor glamour, “Martha” is relentless, down to its final searing images of the captive wife and her too-possessive husband. You don’t have to agree with its premise—that middle-class marriage equals sadomasochism—respond to the bravura comic glee with which the director lays it out.”