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Vidor's Street Scene is a useful model, Rainer Werner Fassbinder scrapes out the drama so the prejudices and anxieties of his deadpan deadbeats fill the void. A pointillistic Munich neighborhood, swift fragments like clenched panels: A lass nude on her tummy clutches a bloke's leg, he pushes her away in a signature posture ("Put it on the bill, baby"). Couples (Hanna Schygulla and Hans Hirschmüller, Lilith Ungerer and Rudolf Waldemar Brem, Irm Hermann and Peter Moland), a hooker-actress (Elga Sorbas) and her john (Harry Baer), the lonesome prude (Doris Mattes): Figures pinned to courtyards, frozen in staircase embraces, playing cards, staring into beer glasses. Transactions in stasis, "love and so on always have to do with money." Each frontal tableau is sculpted with the weight of alienation (occasional reverse tracking shots set to faux-Schubert tinkling mock the lack of political-spiritual mobility), nothing to do until "ein ausländer" enters, the Greek laborer (Fassbinder) who gives focus to the group's simmering resentment. Gossip and lies spread, soon the outsider has become a Communist rapist due for a pummeling. "Better to make new mistakes than to perpetuate old ones," so it goes with the idle Teutonic bunch, the fascist strain always loves a scapegoat. Fassbinder keeps his comedy of torpor taut and baleful, nailing an Elvis album cover to a blank wall and steering his bored-insouciant-witty Antiteater troupe in and out of their micro-narratives. "Foreign habits" and smiling threats, the charged stillness that follows Love Is Colder Than Death's Nouvelle Vague skittering. "Liebe gute," declares the bruised visitor, the moll has her own take: "Not for me. It makes you old." Cinematography by Dietrich Lohmann. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |