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"A wonderful romance, the entrepreneur and the lottery queen." Lang's vertical roulette of fate (Rancho Notorious) appears early on as a Ferris wheel at the carnival where "Fox the Talking Head" (Rainer Werner Fassbinder) works, his partner (Karl Scheydt) is arrested while introducing his act. The bloke is affable rough trade, a bit slow on the uptake but certain of his luck, and indeed ten marks filched from a smitten florist soon balloon into half a million from a local raffle. His new lover (Peter Chatel) is "posh and prissy" and cunningly adept at separating him from his fortune. Money runs out in tandem with love, "precious things have their price." The queer community, to Fassbinder as venally beholden to capitalism as the straight one. Good enough to save the printshop from bankruptcy but not good enough to take to the opera, so it goes for the prole humiliated in a procession of tight compositions, a studded denim jacket giving way to an ill-fitting tuxedo. The apartment accumulates luxury "a bit like a museum," the lavish chandelier hangs low so guests go around it. Sirk's snobs, ever ready to sneer at bread crumbled into lobster bisque, no escape. (The cruising Moroccan vacation is curtailed by Holiday Inn rules.) "When I have fun, I want to have regrets." The relentless companion piece to The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant has the auteur bare before the camera, at a low point his character sleeps in his car and turns on the radio and of course Leonard Cohen starts croaking at him. Besieged nervous system and broken heart, the cold floor at the blue station is an appropriate last stop. "The people you associate with, my dear." With Karlheinz Böhm, Adrian Hoven, Christiane Maybach, Hans Zander, Kurt Raab, Rudolf Lenz, Peter Kern, Karl-Heinz Staudenmeyer, Irm Hermann, Harry Baer, Lilo Pempeit, Barbara Valentin, Ingrid Caven, and El Hedi ben Salem
--- Fernando F. Croce |