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"A comedy in six parts," a restroom scrawl ("Slave seeks master to train me as his dog," etc.) introduces each. The Kaiser Wilhelm Church dominates the Berlin skyline as viewed from a glassy high-rise office, a shooting takes place on a flickering monitor. Surveillance footage? No, the ending of The Devil, Probably. Each generation has the revolutionaries it deserves, following the Baader-Meinhoff affair one is stuck with middle-class ninnies: Leader (Volker Spengler), secretary (Hanna Schygulla), schoolteacher (Bulle Ogier), composer (Udo Kier), hausfrau (Margit Carstensen). The puppet master is the industrialist (Eddie Constantine) who heralds cinema's utopian lies ("As long as movies are sad, life isn't"), the corporation has security equipment to promote so he manipulates the radicals into kidnapping him and sits back to enjoy the clown show. Ovid's "mid course between extremes" has deserted Rainer Werner Fassbinder's nation, the dissenters now stand around playing Monopoly and adorn themselves with wigs, veils, and mustaches. Raúl Gimenez with fedora is a throwback to the mocking noir of The American Soldier, the infiltration of a government office unravels like a Laurel and Hardy one-reeler. Günther Kaufmann in blackface, Y Sa Lo calmly shooting smack in the foreground of a swarming composition, Lilo Pempeit caked with Baby Jane dust at the piano. The old-timers are duly crestfallen: "Back in my day we read more positive things. Hegel, Kant, Nietzsche..." Chabrol's Nada is a notable precedent for the vaudeville of anger and disillusionment. Once the ideals of rebellion are effaced, radicalism itself becomes capitalism's bread and circuses—mutiny as carnival, with the hostage smiling for the camera. With Harry Baer, Hark Bohm, Jürgen Draeger, and Vitus Zeplichal.
--- Fernando F. Croce |