Lola

Lola (1981) is a Rainer Werner Fassbinder drama you can watch online on iFILM. The place is a small Bavarian town in 1957, deep in West Germany's economic miracle. A new building commissioner, von Bohm, arrives — an upright civil servant who has no idea how deep the local rot runs.

The town is really run by the developer Schuckert, and his mistress is the cabaret singer and prostitute everyone respectable knows only as Lola. Barbara Sukowa plays her with zero self-pity: Lola wants money, a house, and standing, so she sets out to make the commissioner fall for her without giving up her old trade. Armin Müller-Stahl is von Bohm, whose honesty turns out to be just another thing for sale. Marriage offers her a way into polite society and him the ruin of his career.

This is the third part of Fassbinder's BRD Trilogy and his open nod to Sternberg's The Blue Angel. The garish candy-bright palette he shoots it in turns a love story into a biting satire of capitalism, where everything and everyone carries a price tag. Best for viewers ready for cold irony and postwar German context rather than a straight romance. Stream Lola (1981) online on iFILM.