Cast:
Ulli Lommel (Bruno), Rainer Werner Fassbinder (Franz), Hanna Schygulla (Joanna), Katrin Schaake (Woman on train), Liz Soellner (Newspaper Saleswoman), Gisela Otto (Prostitute), Ursula Strätz (Prostitute), Monika Stadler (Waitress), Hans Hirschmüller (Peter), Les Olvides (Georges), and Peer Raben (Jürgen) Written and Directed by Rainer Werner Fassbinder.
Review:
"I don’t find melodrama ‘unrealistic’; everyone has the desire to dramatise the things that go on around him. Plus everyone has a mass of small anxieties that he tries to get around in order to avoid questioning himself; melodrama comes hard up against them."
I have to admit that I was a bit surprised that Movie Night actually had covered a Germany-related film (German-language or otherwise) 21 times now, which actually is only behind Japan and France in world cinema. And yet, well, here we finally are with Rainer Werner Fassbinder. He was born in the wake of the surrender of Germany in World War II, being born on May 31, 1945 in a town called Bad Wörishofen, which was occupied by the U.S. Army at the time. The son of a doctor and a translator, he actually spent time at the cinema or as a juvenile delinquent. Fassbinder attended night school and studied drama to go along with taking acting lessons. He made his first short films during this time (one inspiration was Éric Rohmer's Le Signe du Lion [1962] along with plays. He didn't get to attend Berlin Film School, but he eventually joined a theater for acting, directing, and scriptwriting before becoming its leader for a number of months. In 1969 (when he was 24 years old, I might add), he became a feature film director with Love Is Colder Than Death (released in Germany as "Liebe ist kälter als der Tod"); he wrote and edited the movie to go along with being director/actor as one that "was made almost entirely without money". It got booed at a film festival in Berlin when shown but it now has actual respect nowadays. Openly bisexual and outspoken in his beliefs, Fassbinder would direct a handful of films (over twenty) and TV productions with varying phases (ones influenced by the "Novelle Vague" or Douglas Sirk, for example) while also working in the theater (with a certain type of familiar people to him) all the way to his last movie with Querelle (1982), which was released months prior to his death due to an overdose at the age of 37.
Admittedly, it is the kind of movie one watches on the same type of night as say, Breathless [1960] (interestingly, Fassbinder dedicated the movie to filmmakers such as Claude Chabrol, Éric Rohmer, Jean-Marie Straub). Calling it a "nouvelle vague influence" isn't to the movie's detriment, one will say. Basically, you get a stripped-down gangster movie that is oddly stylized in its coldness that, well, will satisfy somebody enough for 88 minutes. One basically is encountering a place that draws people out in the barest of ways that lingers on these people that cannot escape their fates or who they really are despite everything to the contrary. Fassbinder evidently was quoted as one saying that life wasn't manageable and accessible "until the moment when death is accepted as the true aspect of existence". Wrapped in a theatricality that dwells on the off-putting ways we try to live around ourselves. People use and get used for a variety of things and simply believe that the ride will go as long as possible and this film basically has one question their most private feelings inside. Love triangles and would-be heists go by the wayside to the great inevitable, no matter if one lashes out or not at the world. You've got Fassbinder and his steely nature that can only look at the person around him, as played to a certain type of deferred nature by Schygulla (as one does when doing a pimp-prostitute dynamic where one hits a guy when confronted with, well...). Lommel makes a curious interloper, one who tries to play the game of betrayal better than the others that can only result in, well, a certain type of "human" decision. Basically, you get a curiously type of winded-up toy in clear-headed photography that encloses grimy people that think they can play people and things (notice how the movie plays off using a gun). The ending is more of a pause for the inevitable, right down to the last line that might as well describe each of the lead characters in the long run. It may be a downer type of movie for certain folks, but there is clear interest and talent around the camera for reaching the audience in curiosity for a certain type of individual that has their desires wrapped up in a ball they can only hope to not crash unto the surface.
Overall, I give it 8 out of 10 stars.
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