A sultry, neon-lit reworking of The Blue Angel, Rainer Werner Fassbinder's Lola uses the heightened visual language of Sirk to unleash a scathing comedy of morality. In 1950s West Germany, Lola (Barbara Sukowa) is a lounge singer/sex worker at a bordello run by the conniving developer Schuckert (Mario Adorf), with whom she has a child. To increase revenue Schuckert needs to illegally add three floors to his establishment, so hatches a plan to compromise the righteous building commissioner Herr von Bohm (Armin Mueller-Stahl). When the commissioner is lured into the cabaret he finds himself entranced by this decadent demi-monde, ready to reject bourgeoisie normalcy and risk it all for the magnetic Lola herself.

Part of Fassbinder's BRD Trilogy (Bundesrepublik Deutschland) set in the turbulence of postwar Germany, Lola uses the lens of the so-called "economic miracle" and rapid reconstruction to examine the transactional, exploitative tendency of desire. Highly exaggerated era-appropriate visuals combined with a broad narrative style and Fassbinder's cheeky literalism make this less a sly satire than a supertextual takedown of melodrama that still revels in its excesses. Barbara Sukowa provides a fluttering heart to all this camp as Lola: the object of obsession for every man she meets, who nevertheless longs for self-determination that climaxes in an existential strip-tease that's one of a kind.