With some openly comic touches on a wide palette, Rainer Werner Fassbinder satirizes something in The Marriage of Maria Braun/Die Ehe der Maria Braun, though, aside from what is straight and what tongue-in-cheek, the question is, exactly what is his target? Germany and the recent past and present? The nation’s bourgeoisie, or the mentality of roaring industrial capitalism? The insidious trap that is marriage, sexual or race relations, women exploited by/exploiting men? Or the whole kit and caboodle?

However you choose to slice this art-houser, it is among the most entertaining and provocative from the prolific, provocative director. Opening and closing with explosions -- against a skewed photo of Der Führer in 1943, the first of them will echo the desperate, daylong marriage of another Braun, Eva, to Adolf Hitler -- the film mixes war and peacetime, realism and surrealism, period detail with high Deco-kitsch, baroque and ultra-modern, nobility and venality, hypocritical appearances vs. deep love, true emotion and stagy melodrama, the tragic and the comic. Co-written by Fassbinder from his original idea, the result covers too much in two 16-mm hours but is enormous if sobering fun and one of the notable accomplishments of modern German cinema.

This film, the final work screened in the NYPL/Donnell Media Center’s Gay Pride Month tribute to Fassbinder, was the first installment of that director’s trilogy about post-war German women. Both here and in the following Lola, there are parallels to von Sternberg and Dietrich’s Blaue Engel Lola-Lola; Berlin’s Golden Bear for 1982 and based on fallen Reich film star Sybille Schmitz, finale Veronika Voss/Die Sehnsucht der Veronika Voss disappoints, a sort of Rhinelander Sunset Boulevard (in which film von Sternberg figures as actor).

The filter in Maria Braun is of course brown, a muted, at times news-footage feel of the era, and though other color gradually crops up, even garish reds do not glare through Michael Bilhaus’ lens, as the tale progresses from mid-‘40s chaos and scarcity -- of food, clothing, heat, men -- to the moral bankruptcy of economic miracle. In a bombshell-rather-than-shotgun wedding, young Maria (Hanna Schugulla) and Hermann Braun (Klaus Löwitsch) are joined, one night after which he is mustered to the Eastern Front, where, initially reported missing, according to unscathed returnee Willi (Gottfried John) he is killed.

Convinced that her husband is alive and their love undying, the bride will earn a living for Mother (Gisela Uhlen) and Grandpa Berger (Anton Schirsner) in a bar for black GIs. From among them, she accepts as lover the older, kind “Mr. Bill” (George Byrd). Perhaps emasculated but certainly balding, Hermann shows up, and in comic mock struggle she inadvertently kills the American soldier, for which crime her husband is sentenced. Casual about losing an unborn mulatto child, she turns to supporting the household and uncommunicative jailed Hermann by becoming the mistress and efficient secretary of another kind but even older man, textile tycoon Karl Oswald (Ivan Desny). Depending on situation and location, no-nonsense capitalist cool or kittenishly sexual, she rises equally in the business world and her boss’ affections.

Growing colder, she still maintains unlikely friendship with Willi and the grudging respect of accountant Senkenberg (Hark Bohm, of the trademark spectacles), and travels to pick up paroled Hermann. But the jailbird is flown by half an hour, supposedly to make his fortune in Australia or Canada. At this point, and no wonder -- but it’s so entertaining, who cares? -- involutions grow murky. The best bet is that, knowing a liver ailment dooms him, modest, polite Oswald has visited Hermann to offer a chunk of his estate provided the latter make himself scarce for a space. Maria, meanwhile, believes she can love the two men, albeit in different ways, but her character hardens into calculating, petty cruelty.

Oswald succumbs, Senkenberg and secretary Frau Ehmcke (Lieselotte Eder) cry, Hermann shows up laughably well-dressed, the last will and testament is read, and, to a radio’s screaming the nation’s soccer victory, Maria undresses down to Dietrich/Madonna bustier and stockings and tries to light one cigarette too many.

The complications, the contradictions and the contrasts are in themselves hilarious, but beyond the laughter and heavily foreshadowed but surprise ending, lies a wealth of possibilities. Fassbinder has led the audience a merry chase up many alleys. Questions are many, clear answers few, and the effect terrific.

(Released by New Yorker Films; not rated by MPAA.)