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He lies battered behind the opening credits, "Whity" née Samuel King (Günther Kaufmann), next seen in resplendent waistcoat and gloves to diligently serve his oppressors. (The kitchen of the mansion has chopped fish, caged bird, "Battle Hymn of the Republic" and spit on servitude, a characteristically compressed composition.) His mother's charcoal blackface contrasts with the pasty pancake of the Nicholson clan, patriarch (Ron Randell), wife (Katrin Schaake), sons epicene (Ulli Lommel) and brain-damaged (Harry Baer), all wearing the blueish skin of incestuous zombies. Suspended between poles, the bastard offspring welcomes the whip: "Danka, massa." Rainer Werner Fassbinder's America, the Old South by way of the Old West, an outrageous German line building toward the Tarantino of Django Unchained. (With ruffled vest and bullet belt at the poker table, the filmmaker is a game cowpoke.) At the saloon a rose from the chanteuse (Hanna Schygulla) who sings lyrics like "It makes me ring-a-ding dial, come and make me love or cry," at home overlapping murder contracts. Bondage of sadomasochism, insurrection as oedipal rupture. Leone's Spanish plains revisited and Morrricone's trumpets and strings recreated, a sense of diseased lushness in Cinemascope to offset the deadpan Antiteater tableaux. (Michael Ballhaus' camera sliding from face to face in the darkened living room during the reading of the will is just the kind of shot the supercilious cinéaste in Beware of a Holy Whore would have ordered.) Band of Angels plus The Halliday Brand plus Home from the Hill divided by Teorema, "it doesn't go together." A serene massacre settles "the curse of the family," Genet's Les Nègres is a notable mainstay. Into the desert for liberation and death, a long way from Sternberg's Morocco. With Elaine Baker, Tomás Blanco, Stefano Capriati, Helga Ballhaus, Peter Berling, and Kurt Raab.
--- Fernando F. Croce |