Lust For Love (original title: Mahlzeiten) is in black and white, and certainly an attempt at an art movie. It is one of the early works of prolific German director Edgar Reitz, born 1932, and still active in directing.
The movie chronicles the life of a young woman, Elizabeth, who is determined to get as much love and happiness as possible out of life (personally, I think it would have been a better idea if a movie with such a theme had been in colour). “Chronicled” is the right word, as much of the story is narrated in voice-over, almost as an anthropological study.
Elizabeth marries Rolf early on, and the story is about their life and relationship. They are both devoted to each other and their increasing number of children, but there keeps being something missing from their very conventional and bourgeois existence. Neither of them ever finished their studies, and both go through crises where they need to be away from each other for a while. Part of the story is seen from Rolf’s point of view, and by the time he is 29, he and Elizabeth have five children. Elizabeth is against contraception, but at some point it is strongly hinted that she becomes tired of having still more children, and has an abortion.
To fill the spiritual gap in their lives, Mormon missionaries happen along and successfully induct Rolf and Elizabeth into the Church of the Latter-day Saints. Soon after, however, Rolf gets so depressed with his aimless existence that he commits suicide. Elizabeth, in contrast, finds a substitute (Mormon) husband, moves to America, and is finally happy.
It is clearly a movie about what constitutes happiness, and how differently (some) men and women feel about the project of the nuclear family. Although it is somewhat critical of the old-fashioned bourgeois lifestyle, it also seeks solutions within those sorts of frames, such as “that old-time religion”. Just what Rolf’s problem was is never quite clear (although I could venture scores of suggestions) – at one point there is a very strange scene involving some fish in their bathtub, which are then suddenly on the floor, gasping for oxygen. It must illustrate, in some way, how Rolf felt in the relationship, and how Elizabeth could not understand it.
The promotional material for the movie mentions how Elizabeth is like a vampire who devours her husband, and when he dies then she starts doing the same to another. I didn’t get that impression at all – to me Rolf’s problems were his own, resulting from his lack of a satisfactory career and, perhaps, insufficient masculine intellectual stimuli. If the point is really about Elizabeth sucking the life energy out of her men, then the movie becomes much more misogynist than I initially interpreted it to be. It becomes more fundamentally critical of the nuclear family project as championed by women, and making the point that such a life style is not suited to the male nature. I think the truth is a lot more complex than that.
The movie is from 1967, which is an interesting year. The ‘60s was a period of much upheaval and innovation, but the real explosion did not come until 1968. The cut of people’s conservative and formal clothes in this movie clearly sets it before that time, and had Reitz made this movie a year later, it might have become very, very different. In 1967 it could not have been known what a cultural change was lurking just around the corner, and sadly 1968 made this movie awfully obsolete a year after its release. By ‘68 people had gone on to much greater concerns about new ways of life and fundamental social change, and the way this movie’s plot plays itself out would be of little meaning to any but the most conservative.
Nevertheless, Lust For Love did win a Best First Film at the 1967 Venice Film Festival, launching the director on a long directing career on an international scene.
The disc is subtitled in English, but has no extras beyond scene selections.
Lust For Love is released on DVD April 16th.
Director: Edgar Reitz
Cast: Heidi Stroh, Georg Hauke, Nina Frank and others.
Runtime: 90 min.
Country: Germany
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