Martha

Martha (1974), Rainer Werner Fassbinder.

"Given the hints here of this emotional bond on her part, there's something awry with her subsequent reaction to her father's death when she phones her mother from the German embassy: she's far more concerned with the theft of her bag, she veers wildly between outward calm and hysterical outbursts, and — most significantly perhaps — she cadges her first cigarette off an embassy official, that traditional cinematic image (think, as Fassbinder surely was doing, of all the male-female playing with cigarettes in old Hollywood films) of freedom and sexual promise.

(...)

Or there's the scene where Martha sits alone at home, listening to the music prescribed by Helmut, memorizing his engineering textbook, starts to light a cigarette and — suddenly realizing what she is doing — scurries off to the verandah. It's comic, but simultaneously horrifying too.

(...)

Not that Martha's submission is complete. Accommodations to Helmut's program (and his violent sexuality) alternate with hysterical acts of resistance, acts that by the end of the film have spilled over into paranoiac fantasy. There's a question mark over how "real" the man who disconnects the phone may be, especially as, in retrospect, it would appear that his appearance in the park with Helmut, which we experience with — and through — Martha, does not in fact take place. Certainly it is clear that in the climactic car crash at the end of the film Martha is completely fantasizing that Helmut is in the pursuing car behind".

Ian Johnston, "Martha, Interrupted", in Bright Lights Film Journal.