Far from Heaven
Films that shaped it
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I think that’s why Fassbinder, after Sirk, became such a pivotal figure for me, and films like Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (1974) showed what a different kind of critical melodrama could be, and how it could take a critical stance from within the genre, as opposed to from without.
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I think it’s not really a secret that ‘Far From Heaven’ shares stylistic affinities with films like ‘The Conformist,’ 'Death in Venice,’ even ‘Blow-Up.’
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Fassbinder’s The Merchant of Four Seasons... that film, I think, is just such a devastating use of melodrama and theatricality to talk about power and class and the failures of the individual within a system. It’s absolutely something I’ve taken into my own work.
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Fassbinder inherited Douglas Sirk’s melodramatic impulse and pushed it into a much more political, Brechtian, and self-conscious direction, as in The Marriage of Maria Braun or Ali: Fear Eats the Soul. His films had a huge impact on me.
