Monday, June 10, 2024

Richard Linklater | Before Midnight / 2013

fleeing love

by Douglas Messerli

 

(Richard Linklater, Ethan Hawke, and Julie Delpy, screenplay), Richard Linklater (director) Before Midnight / 2013

 

Love and marriage, in Richard Linklater’s trilogy of three films, Before Sunrise, Before Sunset, and Before Midnight, the latter of which was released this year, is presented as something that happens by accident and is transitory at best. Indeed, in a luncheon party at the very center of Before Midnight numerous characters come together to discuss how they perceive their relationships. Each of them pontificate on their ideas, some even arguing—particularly the two young lovers among the group—that in the future love will be a virtual reality with whomever the lover imagines, rather than, as the central characters Jesse (Ethan Hawke) and Céline (Julie Delpy) experience it, as a series of highs and lows to be suffered and negotiated. Yet another guest, Natalia (Xenia Kalogeropoulou), who has recently lost her husband, summarizes the transitory nature of every relationship, explaining how after her spouses’ death she kept trying to remember every gesture of his everyday behavior and the precise elements of his face and body; her sadness emanates from the fact that she now has begun to lose those moments, finding it harder and harder to momentarily bring him back to life in her memory, and realizing that she is now truly losing her husband forever.

 

     And it is this realization, that whatever joys love and marriage have provided to Jesse and Céline necessarily must come unwound, beginning with the most minor of things, that permeates this beautiful film. In their case, Céline perceives her happiness shifting when Jesse—after taking his son from a previous marriage, Hank (Seamus Davey-Fitzpatrick), to the airport for his return home to the US after staying the summer with them in Greece—attempts to discuss his regrets at not having been a better father. In fact, it is his ex-wife, an alcoholic who remains vengeful about their breakup—who has refused to allow Jesse, who with Céline and their twin daughters live in Paris, custody of his son—who has kept Jesse from playing more a role in his son’s life. His consideration that he would like to play a larger role in the boy’s life, accordingly, suggests to Céline that he is hinting that they should move to Chicago—at the very moment when she is at a crossroads in her French-based career. Thus, for her, his mid-life ponderings signal the beginning of the end.


      Since the couple will soon be returning to Paris, their Greek friends have arranged for a night at a nearby hotel free from their daughters, whom the friends will care for. And, as we might expect, the simmering emotions both feel well up into an angry series of battles concerning his and her failures and the problems that, until now, they have basically left unspoken. As an ardent feminist, Céline resents the time Jesse, a well-known novelist, has been away from the family on sales tours and in writing venues; moreover, she slightly resents that he has used their own relationship as a central subject in three of his books.

     He, on the other hand, somewhat resents her insistence that Paris be their home base and her perception that his writing is more a joyful hobby than an actual career. But other deeper issues, their aging, the sacrifices they’ve been forced to make as a family, and basic differences in how they see the world bubble up underneath their primary arguments.


      What is amazing about Linklater’s slightly Strindbergian trilogy, is the fact that, despite his films being primarily a series of cinematic dialogues, they work brilliantly due to the wit of the language and the sincerity of the actors, who have shared in creating that dialogue. Like most couples, no matter how ridiculous and unfounded their claims are, they believe them, or, at least, act like they believe them. Unlike Albee’s Martha and George, who seem to be acting out a ritualistic nightly rite, Jesse and Céline throw up sometimes trivial matters and criticisms of one another that come from their own flaws as human beings; and, accordingly, they are both irrational and deadly serious in their attacks.

        It is the unstated absurdity of some of their positions which also allow Linklater and his characters to discover a more felicitous way out of their self-invented realities than any Strindberg couple. Having slammed their hotel door shut, Céline’s Nora-like figure retreats not to the cold streets but to a picture-postcard seaside bench, where Jesse, ever playing the clown, takes on the mask of a time-traveler, bringing a letter addressed to her future 82-year-old self, which describes this miserable night as being one of the best of their lives.


      Rightfully, Céline is further put off by his ineffectual attempt to win her back. She dismisses his ruse. But soon is again caught up in it because of her own fears of making a stupid mistake of leaving someone who has, as Jesse reminds her, continued to accept her despite her obvious personal traumas. She too, of course, has accepted just such literary nonsense from him. And like most couples who continue to bet odds against the fleeting transitoriness of love, they have no choice but to embrace the fiction instead of their very real feelings. And so too does the audience embrace the fiction of romance we have just witnessed. Whatever happens will never be as tragic as they might have imagined it—except perhaps when, like Natalia, they can no longer conjure up their images of each other.

 

Los Angeles, Christmas Day, 2013

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (December 2013).

Álvaro Pastor | Invulnerable / 2005

admission

by Douglas Messerli


Álvaro Pastor and Antonio Naharro (screenplay), Álvaro Pastor (director) Invulnerable / 2005 [25 minutes]

 

Co-writer Antonio Naharro plays the central figure Elías in this Spanish short film, part of what I might describe as the second wave of films on and about AIDS.

     The film begins with a documentary-like patina, doctors interviewing males and females about their sexual activities and habits presumably before or after AIDS tests, interspersed with scenes from Elías teaching his science class.

 

    Suddenly we see Elías face to face with a doctor who asks “You weren’t expecting it?” Like numerous doctors of the day, she reassures him that “Things have come a long ways now and it has practically just become a chronic disease.”

      So the film announces its slightly different perspective from so many of the AIDS films before it: a study in being HIV positive even with all the drugs that save lives resulting in many of the same stigmas, of the struggles as a gay man to have sexual relationships, and of simply surviving with after-effects of the drugs—major issues with which the rest of the world seems oddly unaware.

      Elías is already in a relationship with a fellow-teacher Pedro (Andrés Waksman) and the tensions between them arise almost immediately, Elías bowing out of future dinner meetings as Pedro tries to the massage the worried look from his face in the faculty room.

      While one can surely condemn our “hero” for not immediately telling his friend of his diagnosis, one also can understand his reluctance, he himself having yet to adjust to the truth and obviously fearful of losing the only support he has, of feeling even further removed from the world from which he is still forced to closet himself. While those around him complain of student cellphones, inattentiveness, and other work-problems the issues that crowd into his head are nearly overwhelming.

 

     Putting off the invitations to spend his nights with Pedro, Elías returns to gay bar life, picking up an American trick to fuck. A moment later he is attending his first AIDS support group meeting wherein we get a glimpse of the both the positive and negative—one woman has now been HIV positive for 20 years, another says her doctor has lowered the dosage of her medications, while others relate how they got there: cheating husbands, loneliness, sexual addiction. Some reveal that after their HIV diagnosis they lost their jobs, their parents stopped communicating with them. When asked how he, a newcomer is, all Elías can respond is, “I’m not sure.”

      Just reading the drug regimen, so it seems, is a bit like encountering the instructions of how to put together a complex piece of furniture from Ikea. In the midst of these cinema moments, he encounters his friend Pedro at one of the bars, both surprised to see one another there. They kiss, and it is difficult for Elías to immediately ignore another sexual meetup.

      We are not certain, in fact, whether or not this scene represents an earlier memory, for soon after we see the two at dinner describing their first sexual experiences, a discussion more likely to have occurred in one of their first meetings. If so, his new regimen brings on his memories of their past joys, revealing the teacher’s recognition that their relationship now may be something only of the past.


      But when we observe him with Pedro again after sex, Elías seems once more troubled as they discuss their relationship of only a week, planning perhaps to move in together. Is this also something of the past or more recent? Had they just met when Elías discovered his condition? Even so he might have infected his friend from their earliest of encounters. 

      Guilt present and past is obviously creating strong feelings for Elías, and whether or not the sexual activities we witness are of long ago or after his diagnosis, their effect on others might be similar. Was the earlier scene in the bar a remembrance of an event that might have led to Elías’ infection? Time suddenly becomes a swirl of sexual memories for a man who suddenly must deal with such a life-altering illness.

      What is clear is that for years Elías had unprotected sex, in bathrooms, bars, and strange beds, feeling himself perhaps invulnerable, particularly after the age in which so many young men and women had died. Those who came of age after new drugs had been discovered simply did not need have the same fears—at least so they imagined, even if, as students of science, they knew of the consequences.

 

     We see Elías almost manically scrubbing down a window, after showering checking over his entire body to see if there are any signs of AIDS. Things have radically changed in his life, although superficially they seem to go on just as before. Finally, he sits down with Pedro and almost off-handedly announces that he is HIV positive. He says he understands fully if Pedro wants to break off their relationship since his own face will soon dry up and his ass will shrink so that his friend may no longer want to fuck him. He takes a ton of pills every day. But most of all, he’s sick of pretending. We now know at least some of their joyful times together, in and out of bed, were after his diagnosis.

      The anger, subdued as it is, quickly follows: “And you knew all the time that you had this?

 

     In the very next frame, a night scene, Elías is wandering the streets alone, the whole world moving on without him, the camera panning on other couples, heterosexual and possibly gay. Obviously, he has broken up with Pedro.

      Soon he is back at the bars having sex, a voice reporting he has run out of condoms, the other muttering, “It doesn’t matter.” Presumably, Elías is that other voice.

      During the days he lectures to his students about new discoveries in viruses, but at night he fucks his way through the bars, increasingly taking drugs other than those he must swallow each day at home.

     Pedro returns to him, but in the midst of a deep embrace as they move toward to sexual moment, he suddenly stops, declaring that “he can’t.”

     At one appointment at the doctor’s, he encounters his ex-lover Lucas. They pretend to each other that things are going well, Elías asking him to text him, an event we perceive unlikely to happen.

     After an argument with his father over an inconvenient visit, Elías suddenly calls up visions of the two of them at the zoo and other lovely moments with both his father and his mother. It is enough to make a grown man break into tears, as Elías now does, his life whirling out of control into what seems like a vortex of wrong decisions. His newest results from an AIDS test comes back positive.

      Elías tells his father about his condition and is embraced with deep love. Before his class—in an enormously brave school-teacher coming out scene the likes of which I’ve not witnessed since Frank Ripploh appeared in front of his class drag in his 1980 film Taxi zum Klo (Taxi to the Toilets)—Elías chalks out a drawing of the human immunodeficiency virus, the AIDS virus, explaining that it’s a virus spread through blood or semen shared with another man or woman, “And I have it.”

 


    The students sit silently in startlement as the film imagines as alternative where they all go screaming from the room, as they might have only a few years earlier if someone had announced that he had AIDS.  But they remain, one student finally daring asking the important question, “Were you infected by blood or semen?” a smile crossing Elías’ in his recognition that things have indeed significantly changed.

     In 2005, the year in which this film was released, according to a UN report there were 4.9 million new infections of the AIDS virus globally, bringing the total number of people living with the virus to 40.30 million individuals. Such important and profound movies such as Invulnerable should not go ignored.

 

Los Angeles, April 19, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (April 2023).

Derek Price | Distance / 2012

leaving without knowing how to explain why

by Douglas Messerli

 

Derek Price (screenwriter and director) Distance / 2012 [7 minutes]

 

French Canadian writer and director Derek Price’s Distance is more a proclamation than it is an exploration of its important subject, men who after several years of heterosexual marriage suddenly come to perceive that they are gay.

      Charles (Julien Masterson) has evidently been unhappy for some time, but on the particular day on which this film is focused he has come home early from work and has been waiting for his wife to return home from shopping.


      Camille (Mélodie Courval) is startled to see him sitting at the dining table and immediately wonders if he is well. He has not been feeling well, he admits, but it’s not like the flu or a cold. At

first he backs out of immediate explanation, but soon after, as images of past parties with their friends flash through his mind—particularly an incident when Camille seems to be paying particular attention to the husband of another friend—he wants to talk to her immediately.

      But she is somewhat miffed, having just gotten in the door. Can’t it wait until she gets a drink of wine?

      Apparently not, for Charles simply tosses it out like a commonplace event: “I’m gay.” Camille is not even quite able to comprehend what he’s saying, until he repeats it, insisting that she very much knows what he means. After a period of suffering in silence, he’s finally come realize he’s a homosexual.

      And no, he assures her, he has not been with another man. He has simply come to the realization and feels it is now only fair that they stop playing husband and wife so that they might both find fuller happiness in their lives.

       Her furor, perhaps understandably, immediately flares. Fair? Fair to whom? Is there even such a concept in his statement that their made their entire five years together meaningless? A lie? She throws a bag of food his way moves to strike him, Charles attempting to hold her off. She pulls away, coming back toward him only for both of them to break down.

        For moment, as they kiss one another, it almost seems like the situation the film has brought up has been forgotten, particularly as they retire to the bedroom, surely to try to restore their relationship once again.

      But a few frames later, it is apparent that it hasn’t worked. Charles is unable to have sex with his wife, and sits up at the side of the bed, simply to apologize for his failure, she comforting him as the credits role 7 minutes into this fraught situation.


      None of the more complex months or even years of marital difficulties is spoken of. Nor is anything mentioned about their inability to communicate as a couple. Or about his betrayal of trust or at least the belief she has place in the relationship. Had they spoken of having children? How had they met in the first place? Were their clues to his other desires? When did Charles first begin to suspect his sexual preference, and more importantly, having had apparently no homosexual experience, how is he certain of his apparent change?

      Of course, any homosexual could probably tell you how they know they’re gay, the attractions they have felt perhaps since childhood to other men, the long denials they have made to themselves and others, one of the worst of those “coverups” having, this case, been the marriage itself.

      Yet the director doesn’t feel it necessary to explore any of this. The film simply reports it as an irrefutable fact. What will happen to the two of them; how they will amicably or even angrily split up their possessions; how might Camille be able to support herself? None of these challenges are even imagined in this work, which itself seems to be “distancing” the cinematic representation of the film’s central issue from the actual event.

      Being gay and leaving a heterosexual relationship is surely not a thing that one simply “announces,” unless one is truly a coward and is afraid to even more fully attempt to explain the thousands of circumstances that went into that decision. A couple of flashbacks to a dinner party may reveal a moment or two of suffering, of even hint at a gradual shifting away from another, but does even begin to explain the phenomena that even feature films such as Arthur Hiller’s Making Love (1982), which attempted to treat the subject seriously; or Woody Allen’s Manhattan (1979), which turns the issue into a one-line joke; or Nigel Finch’s The Lost Language of Cranes (1991), which represents the phenomena as having both tragic and comic results, nor the many others that have featured this subject over the years have been fully able to explain the causes and effects to its own characters and audiences.

 

Los Angeles, June 10, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (June 2024).

Lino Brocka | Maynila sa mga Kuko ng Liwanag (Manila in the Claws of Light) / 1975

the innocents destroyed by their beauty

by Douglas Messerli

 

Clodualdo del Mundo, Jr (screenplay, based on the fiction by Edgardo M. Reyes), Lino Brocka (director) Maynila sa mga Kuko ng Liwanag (Manila in the Claws of Light) / 1975

 

Surely one of the very saddest films ever made, Lino Brocka’s (1939-1991) 1975 masterwork, Manila in the Claws of Light, takes us along for a long tradition of wide-eyed country innocents coming to the big city only to discover how corrupt and destructive that world is.

     One need only think of Charles Dickens’ Oliver Twist, Mário de Andrade famous Brazilian classic fiction Macunaíma, Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure, and more recently, John Schlesinger’s Midnight Cowboy and even John Waters’ Pecker, where the young man, sullied by New York scene, takes his New York acquaintances all back to Baltimore to reveal their own corrupt proclivities.


      The young would-be hero of Brocka’s work is the beautiful wide-eyed Julio Madiaga (Bembol Roco) come to Manila from Marinduque to reclaim his youthful lover Ligaya (Hilda Koronel), who has been lured away, with approval from her family, by the mysterious Mrs. Cruz (Juling Bagabaldo) who promises the young beauty a job and educational opportunities in the capitol city.

      Just observing Mrs. Cruz’s obsessive appetite for alcohol and other pleasures, we quickly perceive that her business is actually involved with the sex-trade, and that poor Ligaya has been sold in her trip to Manila into prostitution.

     Attempting to reconnect with her, Julio travels to Manila, hanging out in places, such as the ever-present Ah-Tek store owned by a Chinese immigrant (the character played by Tommy Yap) who has apparently taken the unfortunate Ligaya as his favorite “woman.” Julio tracks Mrs. Cruz to the Ah-Tek store, and attempts to enter, but is rebuffed.

     Desperate to survive, Julio, who has been a fisherman previously, takes on the hard tasks of working in construction, forging friendships with several of his fellow workers such as Atong (Lou Salvador, Jr.) who befriends Julio and introduces him to the shanty-town conditions that allow him and his family to survive, while every payday being cheated in their paycheck (given what is described as “Taiwan wages,” instead of full pay). Atong, wrongfully arrested, is later murdered.

     Another construction-worker friend, Pol (Tommy Abuel) serves as Julio’s confidant, offering up important information of how to survive in his friend’s new world, and even helping Julio when he has no other place to sleep. They develop a homoerotic relationship, which is made more apparent when, after Julio is fired from his construction job, he is brought, by a passing stranger, Bobby (Joio Abella) into the dark world of Pilipino call-boys when Bobby’s client’s find Julio very attractive. He is, after all, a truly beautiful innocent, whom anyone with a heart might be drawn to.     


    Yet, as we know from the very beginning of this sad tale, Ligaya, once she meets up again with Julio—explaining to him how she has been locked away as Ah-Tek’s lover and explains the full extent of her involvement in Mrs. Cruz’s prostitution ring—that she will not survive. It is left to his friend Pol to reveal the facts of her death.

     Julio’s ineffective attempt at revenge leads to his own death, from the hands of Ah-Tek’s minions.

   This tragic story, so unfortunately, is the story of so very many young people moving from one culture into another in every country on this planet.

     Innocence protected me in my voyage for a year to New York City. But it doesn’t always work out that way. One day, as I was walking the streets in the upper 70s streets, just above Harlem, near to where I lived while working at Columbia University—wearing, improbably, white pants and white shirt—a gang of young males surrounded me, promising a violent encounter; but when they looked at me, and saw the innocence of my eyes, they moved away without even touching me. I was mugged once, and the nervous robber who stole my total month’s salary, ran away without harming me, after demanding that I “drop my pants.”

      But clearly, in the long history of the abused young people who naively come to major cities throughout the world, that doesn’t always work. The beauty of innocence can often be overwhelming, but it can also be an entry for extreme abuse. In the tale Brocka tells, based on Edgardo M. Reyes’ novel, the beautiful are destroyed for no other reason than they are so lovely to look at.

 

Los Angeles, November 24, 2019

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (November 2019).

Rainer Werner Fassbinder | Faustrecht der Freiheit (Fox and His Friends) / 1975, USA 1976

the talking head

by Douglas Messerli

 

Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Christian Hohoff (screenplay), Rainer Werner Fassbinder (director) Faustrecht der Freiheit (Fox and His Friends) / 1975, USA 1976

Despite its tragic ending depicting the death of its hero, his body being robbed by young children, I read Fassbinder's 1975 film, Faustrecht der Freiheit (Fox and His Friends) as a dark comedy, a work that, in many ways, relates to his Petra von Kant, particularly in the melodramatic pitch of the latter’s language, which takes it to the edge of the theater of the absurd.

 

      In Fox and His Friends, however, the hero, Franz “Fox” Biberkopf (played by Fassbinder himself) speaks in a completely naturalistic way, while those around him talk in the affected language of a British drawing room comedy; they are, after all, striving to represent themselves as coming from a kind of bourgeois notion of the upper class, at the same time that their accents, furnishings, clothing, and all other aspects of their lives reveal their middle-class roots.

      Only Fox speaks somewhat normally, although he is regularly described as stupid and uncouth. He is, after all, a true man of the proletariat, a working-class clod who plays a character in the carnival act of his friend and lover, who in the very first scene of the film is arrested for tax evasion.

     In the carnival Franz plays what is described as a “talking head,” a man who supposedly has lost his body, except for his head, which, as “a miracle of science” has been magically kept alive. Apparently, he talks to the audiences, answering their questions and explaining his unusual existential condition.

      We never get to see the real act, but we do observe Fox going through the rest of his life as a kind of “hollow man,” an empty being whose only tool of survival is his somewhat street-smart skills which allow him to con friends out of money and to engage people like Eugen Theiss (Peter Chatel), his soon-to-be lover, with sharp barbs and quick-witted dismissals when he is accused as smelling badly and gaining weight (Fassbinder, so the story goes, dieted heavily before playing Fox)—all failures of the body.

     Early in the film, as he insinuates himself into the lives of the seemingly wealthy young men he meets through a gay antique furniture dealer, Max (Karlheinz Böhm), it seems that he might even outwit these nasty snobs; after all, he has just won 500,000 marks in the lottery, and his sense of new financial possibilities seems almost to make him able to stand up against their snooty dismissal of his clumsy and uncouth behavior. But, in the end, Fox is only, as his real name Biberkopf suggests, a "beaver-head," a hard-working mind that has the ability to assimilate little in the way of imagination. And it is precisely that lack of imagination that prevents him, despite his alcoholic sister, Hedwig’s and his old bar friends’ warnings, to see through the pretense of his new acquaintances.

     Eugen, his new lover, has little skill when it comes to thinking, but is, compared with Fox, a person who celebrates the body, a handsome and fairly well-dressed gay man—if you can forget some of the outrageous combinations of patterns and textures of his suits and ties, all of which betray his lack of any true sense of style—who has been taught to present himself in a comely manner, with a well-spoken voice in both German and, so he claims, French. When the couple later travel to Morocco, however, it becomes apparent that Eugen cannot speak the latter language fluently, while Fox communicates with an Arab hustler with a few words in English.


      His only achievements of the mind relate to his and his family members’ abilities to trick those less fortunate out of their finances and possessions; if Fox is a busy beaver—working for the bookbinding company of Eugen's father even though he has loaned them the money for their survival and is now the legal owner—Eugen and his father are born vultures. And much of the second half of the film is a painful testament to how they cheerfully strip him of his money and any common dignity he might have had. First through the loan to save the company, then, when Eugen is thrown out of his apartment for housing Fox, through the purchase of a condominium and furniture—some of the most absurd combinations of period furniture, patterned wallpaper, and ridiculous objects (including a circular set of attached red-leather chairs, each facing slightly away from the others) imaginable. Fassbinder's set designer should have received an award just for uncovering these garish and tasteless creations.

     Soon after, Eugen insists upon a new car. Later, supposedly to reignite their love, the two take the trip, as I mentioned, to Northern Africa. All is paid for by Fox.

     Yet Eugen and his father take their abuse even further by repaying Fox's loan through his salary and forcing him to sign away the rights to his property. When Eugen explains the situation to Fox, the father responds to his son, "by principle you are right." This man—who unlike Fox's sister, who drinks at home, does his drinking at the office—can't even conceive what the word "principle" means. His only code of conduct is survival.

     Eugen's former boyfriend moves into the apartment, and Fox is locked out.

     Certainly, these scenes do make us cringe. But we must remember that the money Fox has used to get what he hopes might represent love and propriety has been won on a fluke with a few marks stolen from the local florist, "Fatty" Schmidt, a character who clearly brings up Fox's sense of guilt later in the film as Fatty tries to console him; Fox strikes the man in what, to use a rephrasing of the original German title, seems almost to be a "fist-fight for freedom," the freedom, at least, from being reminded of his past.

     Fassbinder's portrayal of Fox is brilliantly subtle, particularly as he begins to spend his money. His repetition of "cash, cash," as the bank teller queries him when he demands the 100,000 marks to loan to Eugen's father, is spoken with extreme nervousness and agitation; and later, as Eugen imagines the rooms of the empty condominium being filled with furniture, Fox turns away with a horribly sickened look on his face. It is as if, throughout his spiraling return to poverty, he is aware of what is happening but unable to prevent succumbing to his lover's demands. Like Petra in Fassbinder's earlier film, there is a kind of absurd joy even in the tortures of love. His busy head, filled with ridiculous aspirations, is slowly being drained of consciousness, and near the end of the film he goes as far as to visit a doctor, reporting his symptoms. Finding nothing outwardly wrong with his patient, the doctor proscribes Valium, a drug which may help to relieve his real anxieties, but which can result in further confusion and depression.

     Broke, Fox returns to his old haunts, where he meets up again with two American soldiers he has once tried to pick up. Since they are now in his gay bar, he cheekily asks them once more if they'd like to join him, to which one of them asks how much he is willing to "pay." With that question, Fox, turning away and hanging his arms around a friend's neck, cries out, "Pay? Pay?" pointing up the irony and absurdity of the life he has led; once the hustler, he has become the consumer, a man, as it puts it, "who pays for everything," not only with money but with his life.


       The very next scene is played out in an over-lit subway where Fox lies dead, killed evidently from an overdose of the Valium. Two well-dressed young boys, vultures in the making, rob him of the money he has received for selling his car, a gold watch, and even his jacket. Two of his former friends, seeing the body and pronouncing him dead, quickly scurry away, not wanting to get involved.

     How did this comic tale of an absurd life suddenly turn into a tragedy one has to ask? Of course, in many of Fassbinder's films, that is just what happens. People with such outrageously dramatic views of life, with hopes out of proportion to possibility or reality, true dreamers, in other words, who live in their heads instead of inhabiting their entire bodies, are often unable to survive. But it could also be as Jim Clark has suggested on his on-line review of this film:

 

“That metro/subway stop is unnaturally—eerily—clean and quiet. Everything is blue and white, even the clothes worn by all the characters who pass through. ...Nothing earlier is as stylized. So, is this just a "Valium-5"-induced nightmare vision? ...Has Fox learned, from his devastating experiences, that the glitzy "lifestyle" he has just lost was what was destroying him? So maybe—just maybe—Fox is ready to begin putting himself back together.... If the final scene is just a nightmare.”

 

     It could be that Fox has finally been able to add some true imagination to the pipe dreams that have filled his head. But even if Fassbinder meant it as a "real" act, we have to remember that little else has been real in Fox's life.

 

Los Angeles, August 4, 2010

Reprinted from Green Integer Review (August 2010).

 

 

My Queer Cinema Index [with former World Cinema Review titles]

Films discussed (listed alphabetically by director) [Former Index to World Cinema Review with new titles incorporated] (You may request any ...