Presuming no objections to a dose or two of Full Frontal Nudity (German Male Division), this middle-period film from Rainer Werner Fassbinder makes an excellent introduction to his work. (Admittedly an acquired taste not everyone acquires.) Rooted in an affair that ended before the film came out (note the dedication), Fassbinder takes on the role of his sex mate, lower-class, ungroomed, rough trade, unable to move into the sophisticated world of a new lover. But if the sexual dynamic was drawn from life, the economic angle gets reversed as Fassbinder’s ex-carny worker wins the lottery, suddenly able to buy a semblance of love by loaning funds to save the family business of his new boyfriend. He may not know which fork to pick up for each course, but can pick up a pen to sign a check or a contract. Needless to say, Fox is being used and while Fassbinder makes didactic drama of cash vs. class, the twosome don’t connect on any level so Fox looks dumb rather than masochistic. He’s like Lana Turner in some ‘40s melodrama from Metro: Gauche small-town girl flunks Life-in-the-Big-City 101. And so deterministic, you wonder if Fassbinder is hunting up mocking realism or the stylized distancing of Bertolt Brecht or Douglas Sirk. Lenser Michael Ballhaus helps with a ‘finished’ look unusual in the Fassbinder æsthetic book while actor-Fassbinder helps director-Fassbinder by getting his weight down just enough to make a plausible object of desire for eccentric, unwashed tastes.
DOUBLE-BILL: Fassbinder’s attempts to break out of the German film scene with DESPAIR/’78 and QUERELLE/’82 are disappointments while BERLIN ALEXANDERPLATZ/’80, his acclaimed mini-series, is a slog. Instead, THE MARRIAGE OF MARIA BRAUN/’79, an ironic post-WWII drama with iconic work from Hanna Schygulla.
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