Monday | October 20, 2003 9:00 pm

Nora Helmer

Screening on Film

Directed by Rainer Werner Fassbinder.
With Margit Carstensen, Joachim Hansen, Ulli Lommel.
West Germany, 1973, 35mm, color, 101 min.
German with English subtitles.

Fassbinder's made-for-television adaptation of Ibsen's The Doll's House remains faithful to the narrative trajectory of the play even as it shifts the psychological and social register of its discourse and rejects the original ending: in Fassbinder's complex moral universe, Nora remains, albeit uncomfortably, in her marriage. For the director, Nora's plight is no more and no less the situation that obtains in "tens of thousands of families" - in which petty quarrels and feeble power plays barely mask the inevitable compromises required by the prevailing social order. As Fassbinder saw it, "All the characters in the play, including Nora, ought to emancipate themselves."