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The prologue sets the blank-pugnacious timbre, introducing Rainer Werner Fassbinder's Job (Hans Hirschmüller) as a sad legionnaire welcomed back by Mother: "The good die young, and people like you return." Hawking peaches in a grayish labyrinth of tenement courtyards, he suggests a sawed-off minotaur; someone calls from the window above, and the action freezes for a high-angled tableau (peddler in rolled-up sleeves, wife adjusting garter belt, produce cart diagonally between them) that would have excited Edward Hopper's jealousy. When he dashes off to the tavern to dodge his nagging wife (Irm Hermann) and then lumbers home to smack her in front of their daughter, the frenzy is recorded in a brutal long take capped by a slow zoom on the lumpy, sloshed figure. A world of quotidian prisons, of worth measured in money and people taking turns oppressing and being oppressed. Sirk is there when the distraught Hermann is framed against the mannequins of a store display as she's mistaken for a hooker, yet Fassbinder pushes further: Discovered in flagrante delicto with another man, the nude, gangling hausfrau can only hide behind bedroom curtains and weep. (Hirschmüller's leisurely pirouette of a heart attack adduces a note from Ray's Bigger Than Life.) The family of vipers at dinner, the bouquet of flowers rejected by the dream lover (Ingrid Caven), the old comrade (Klaus Löwitsch) who usurps his place with helpless inevitability—the grinding process is followed through all the way to the merchant's saloon seppuku, facing the camera and ritualistically gulping down shot after shot of lethal liquor. An unforgettable cantata, raspy and plangent, every composition attuned to circles of torment and frustration. It's ruthless, but, as the tough-minded sister (Hanna Schygulla) puts it, "not aggressive, just frank." Cinematography by Dietrich Lohmann. With Gusti Kreissl, Andrea Schober, Karl Scheydt, and Kurt Raab.
--- Fernando F. Croce |