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River of Death, still better than "the same old grind." The opening shows Rainer Werner Fassbinder's signature sang-froid, Hanna Schygulla casually in garter belt and stockings while psychedelic trance pours from the Victrola, on the phone her mother wonders if she's warmly dressed. Working-class knuckleheads and their dreams of escape, moving to Peru sounds good to the tile-layer (Michael König) and the buddy just out of the Navy (Günther Kaufmann), there may be a treasure there and besides the Mayans had great and bloody rituals. "An economically underdeveloped country just waiting to be animated by our highly civilized culture." They wrestle like Flagg and Quirt, argue over the embassy phone like Abbott and Costello, recite clunky statistics to potential investors like nervous schoolboys. Schygulla meanwhile shimmies to "Jailhouse Rock" before a certain leather-jacketed bumpkin and takes part in agitprop demonstrations. (The latest stunt has a bunch of declamatory kooks chain-smoking in front of a blackboard where a chalk phallus is marked "USSA": "The repression of women can be best recognized in women's own behavior.") Sell the car, move in with friends and ask mom for money, and the cotton farm in South America is no less of a macho myth. Scrambling for expedition funds is much like pitching a movie, says Fassbinder, thus the joke of Germans in the jungle is taken at face value by Herzog the following year (Aguirre, der Zorn Gottes). Dead ends and rough zooms, and yet the blokes who are enraptured by a reading of Lana Turner's biography see their half-baked scheme blessed by a fairy godmother. The finale becomes Godard's in Je vous salue, Marie. With Katrin Schaake, Ulli Lommel, Marius Aicher, Walter Sedlmayr, and Carla Egerer.
--- Fernando F. Croce |