This paper considers Rainer Werner Fassbinder's 1974 melodrama Martha in a transnational, comparative framework, focusing on the film's relationship to the Hollywood woman's film of the 1940s and 1950s. Such an approach illustrates the ways in which Martha both draws on and pushes against the narrative strategies, tropes, and images of Hollywood and of women's culture. In doing so, I argue, Fassbinder takes to a narrative and aesthetic extreme what Lauren Berlant calls the female complaintthat cultural constellation in which women live for love, and love is the gift that keeps on taking. Viewed both transnationally and as a product of Fassbinder's Germany, a film like Martha pushes against Berlant's theory of the American woman's film and of the female complaint as modes by which women manage their intimate lives under conditions of patriarchy. In addition to engaging with Berlant's work, my analysis of Fassbinder's film and its performance of gender consequently draws not only on theories of melodrama and the American woman's film, but also on Bertolt Brecht's writing on Gestus. Fassbinder, I ultimately show, estranges the Hollywood woman's film in Martha. Harnessing the affective and emotional excess of the woman's film as Brechtian distanciation, exaggerating social gesture, and playfully appropriating Sirkian aesthetics, Martha offers a spectacular critique of the masochism inherent in gender roles under patriarchy.