The female part of a man called Eva: from the archive, 22 December 1984
Eva Mattes, the German actress, has taken a great many risks already in her comparatively short life. Before she came of age, she played a Vietnamese girl raped five times by American soldiers and then murdered in a film called Okay, which caused a scandal at the Berlin Festival of its year. Then she played for Rainer Werner Fassbinder in a film called Jailbait, whose title is explanatory. In the New Year British audiences will see her in a film about Fassbinder himself. It is called A Man Like Eva; and she plays Fassbinder.
It isn’t just because she looks very like the enfant terrible director when she dons a wispy moustache and beard and pads herself out with a paunch. That, she says, was not the point. The purpose of having an actress play the part was to stop the film looking like a biography, and to help make it into the kind of non-realist melodrama that Fassbinder himself encompassed.
It’s a film, she adds, not so much about Fassbinder as about the very thin dividing line between what an artist achieves and what he or she actually is.
Guardian, 22 December 1984. Photograph: Guardian
She knew Fassbinder quite well after appearing in several of his films and theatre productions and says that he was always very kindly and protective to work for. She’ll always remember how she first met him. It was at a disco when she was just 15.
She was there with her mother, a former film star, and was deeply embarrassed when her mother went over to where Fassbinder was sitting and told him about her daughter’s acting ability. “He was very quiet and gentle. He seemed to understand what my mother was doing, and what I felt about it. I respected him for that.”
Eva, who has since developed into one of Germany’s best film and theatre actresses, says she made A Man Like Eva out of respect for Fassbinder and hated it when the film was accused of being exploitative.
Eva, born in Bavaria of an Austrian father and a Hungarian mother (stage name Margret Symo) is principally known here for Percy Adlon’s Celeste, in which she played Proust’s housekeeper, for Helma Sanders-Brahms’s Germany Pale Mother and for the two Herzog films, Woyzeck and Stroszek. Her reputation rides high.
Playing Fassbinder, however, she considers her biggest gamble of all - a risk that people will criticise rather than praise her. “But that’s alright,” she says, “I work exactly like Fassbinder himself, at full stretch and on the very edge.”