Oskar Roehler | Enfant Terrible / 2020

double talk

by Douglas Messerli

 

Klaus Richter (screenplay), Oskar Roehler (director) Enfant Terrible / 2020

 

Can we talk? Maybe I should begin by explaining that aesthetically I idolize Rainer Werner Fassbinder. I believe him to be not only a genius but one of the best film directors of the long list of that artform’s first century filmmakers; and that covers a lot of territory!

     Although I’ve never been attracted to his overweight, generally punk leather looks nor to the individuals, basically rough trade boys, curly-haired, tough women, and transsexual cross-dressers  and others to whom he most seemed attracted, I always sympathized with his sexual life. Moreover, I have long been aware that if I’d met him at the right age (he was born only two years before I was), and had been in Germany in the 1970s when he made most of his films, I might have become part of his cult—although I’ve never been good at cult membership. And as an innocent white boy, I clearly was not his type.

      But even in the 1980s, before I had actually seen his films, I kept eyeing the film publications of Fassbinder along with the other German filmmakers of his generation (Werner Herzog, Volker Schlöndorff, Werner Schroeter, Hans-Jürgen Syberberg, and Wim Wenders) at the famed Frankfurt Book Fair. And they, evidently had been keeping on eye on me, the New York agent eventually contacting me years later to see if I might be interested in publishing all of Fassbinder’s work, to which I immediately agreed. Rights and permissions issues, as well as possibly the fact that they eventually perceived that I didn’t have the finances to properly support our mutual enthusiasm finally ended the discussions.

      Finally, Fassbinder and I share almost the same birthday as deep Geminis, his May 31, mine a day earlier—although I’ve always inexplicably believed I was born on the 3lst.

     I can’t ignore the facts, however, that he treated his first female love, Irm Hermann, despicably, casting her as outsider monsters and treating her to domestic violence. In 1969, while performing in colleague Volker Schlöndorff’s Baal, he met the black Bavarian actor Günther Kaufmann (Michael Klammer), whom despite the fact that Kaufmann was married and had two children, Fassbinder fell deeply in love, attempting to woo him with outrageously expensive gifts such as four Lamborghinis in a single year, one of which Kaufmann wrecked and others of which he sold. But when Kaufmann became romantically involved with Fassbinder’s regular (and I might add brilliant) composer, Peer Raben (Markus Hering), the relationship came to an end. Kaufmann nonetheless appeared in 14 of Fassbinder’s films.

     Despite his opposition to heterosexual marriage, in 1970 Fassbinder wedded actress Ingrid Craven, a regular in his more than 40 films. Their wedding reception is recycled into one of Fassbinder’s more important films, The American Soldier (1970). Their two-year relationship was a disaster, but one that Craven lovingly documented:

 

"Ours was a love story in spite of the marriage. Rainer was a homosexual who also needed a woman. It's that simple and that complex."

 

     Neither Hermann, Craven, or Fassbinder’s last partner, Juliane Lorenz, were openly disturbed by the fact that Fassbinder was primarily homosexually attracted to men.

     In 1971, the director began and close relationship with El Hedi ben Salem (Erdal Yıldız), a Moroccan Berber who has left behind a wife and five children. Meeting in a Paris gay bathhouse, ben Salem appeared in several Fassbinder movies, most notably in Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, one of Fassbinder’s films that moves away from gay sexuality into the impossibilities of living as a migrant black in the German world.

      Despite any sympathy the film might have betrayed however, their own relationship was, as even the generally mild-mannered Wikipedia entry, exclaims in a seemingly hushed rush of high gossip:  

 

“Their three-year relationship was punctuated with jealousy, violence and heavy drug and alcohol use. Fassbinder finally ended the relationship in 1974, due to Salem's chronic alcoholism and tendency to become violent when he drank. Shortly after the breakup, Salem stabbed three people (none fatally) in Berlin and had to be smuggled out of the city. Salem eventually made his way to France where he was arrested and imprisoned. He hanged himself while in custody in 1977.News of Salem's suicide was kept from Fassbinder for years. He eventually found out about his former lover's death shortly before his own death in 1982 and dedicated his last film, Querelle, to Salem.”

 

     Fassbinder’s next lover, Armin Meier (Jochen Schropp), ended up no better. The former near-illiterate butcher, who had spent much of his youth in an orphanage, appeared in a great many Fassbinder films throughout the 1970s. Fassbinder ended their relationship in 1978, but during birthday celebrations of the director, the actor deliberately consumed four bottles of sleeping pills and alcohol in the apartment which he had shared with Fassbinder, his dead body discovered a week later.

    These assorted sordid adventures should surely have prepared me for the fact that there might be a film such as Oskar Roehler’s Enfant Terrible.

     I had never imagined Roehler’s film, as Peter Bradshaw described it in The Guardian as being: “a heartfelt and appropriately awestruck portrait of the bleary Byron of the German new wave.” Rather, I saw this film, despite all of Fassbinder’s obvious failures as a human being, as a truly offensive over-the-top depiction of the German director, displayed in horrific black-and-white images and lurid three-color depictions (red-green-and ochre), of a truly monstrous representation of Fassbinder. The truly overweight, overacting Oliver Masucci sticks out his belly as if pretending to be a mad director determined to destroy all those about him without sense of real directorial knowledge or an iota of cinematic history—despite the real Fassbinder’s attendance of hundreds, if not thousands, of childhood movie theater attendances.

    This film, seemingly created by someone who has no real notion of how to film a movie, presents his hero as simply a psychological mess.

      As film critic Matt Zoller Seitz observes:

 

“Built around a bulldozer of a lead performance by Oliver Masucci—who carries on with rough-trade swagger, portraying Fassbinder as a demonic bully who gets into people's heads—the entire story is presented as if it were an early Fassbinder experiment, half-in and half-out of the late-1960s black box theater scene. Actors inhabit key moments in Fassbinder's life on stage sets with minimal props. In a bar scene, for example, the stools, the bar itself, and important objects are three-dimensional props, but the liquors and glasses and mirror behind the bar are painted. There is no audience save for the viewer. Characters often storm on- and offstage from the wings. Even locations that would seem to cry out for grand cinematic treatment (including nightclub exteriors, alleyways, major thoroughfares, and indoor banquet halls; there's even a rain scene) are presented as stripped-down stage tableaux, seemingly with the expectation that viewers will use their imagination to fill in what's not there, as they would if they were attending a play in a 40-seat underground theater in Munich.”

 

     As Seitz perceives, this might have been “a marvelous conceit” in the true spirit of early Fassbinder, but what does it convey about the German director’s real relationships:

 

“But for the most part, the treatment here is rather cursory, defined entirely in terms of how Fassbinder used people and what that manipulative behavior revealed about his own lack of conscience or impulse control. It's also very male-centric; Fassbinder's gift for creating complex, troubled, dynamic female characters is barely touched on, Hanna Schygulla, the director's most acclaimed leading lady; Ursula Strätz, founder of the Munich Action Theater, where Fassbinder started out; and Barbara Valentin and Brigitte Mira, costars of "Fear Eats the Soul," are barely acknowledged. The film is mainly interested in what a monumental jerk Fassbinder could be, treating theater companies, film crews, actors, producers, lovers, and family members like obstacles, raw material, or garbage, depending.”

     This vision of Fassbinder hardly permits any of the intelligence which comes through absolutely in every movie he created. We are left instead with a dumb, demanding, almost heteronormative critter a bit like Donald Trump who wants what he wants immediately and will refuse nothing less. There is never an occasion for subtlety or thought in Roehler’s conception, unless it is expressed in sweaty tears.

    Variety writer Peter Debruge nicely summarizes my emotions:

 

“By eschewing realism in his aesthetic, Roehler can arguably get away with using the much-older Masucci in the lead role (a choice not unlike 60-something Willem Dafoe playing Vincent Van Gogh or Pier Paolo Pasolini), though it’s less than ideal, failing to represent how vulnerable Fassbinder could be early on. Instead, he appears here as a greasy, gut-thrusting slob from the get-go: Masucci semi-obscenely presents his stomach like a metaphorical phallus, wielding it proudly throughout, as when he challenges a jealous, switch-blade-wielding Salem with it at a bar. Even more distracting, the film serves up kitschy cameos by such contemporaries as Andy Warhol and Freddie Mercury.”

 

     Can we talk? In hindsight, I’m happy that I didn’t meet Fassbinder in the very years when I was a young, very cute boy, swishing through New York City as if ready to be discovered, at the very time when Fassbinder was a regular at the Manhattan bars. Big deal! I wasn’t ready and Werner wasn’t where I was at that moment in time and space. When I was just coming into my sexuality, he as already discovering the universe of deep and very dark emotions about the German world into which he was born and had infused into his sensibility, a terrifying reality which I could never have comprehended.

      Fassbinder might have misled many a man or woman, have demanded a love which destroyed them and him. After all he himself died of drugs at the age of 37. This is the story of deep melodrama, not the machinations of a trite, overacted, badly filmed biopic.

     Roehler has little or nothing at all do with it.

Los Angeles, June 26, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (June 2024).