Calling: Fassbinder

Now that Todd Haynes, Stephen Daldry and Neil LaBute are film culture’s reigning art frauds, it’s the right time–in fact, it’s urgently necessary–to rediscover Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Of the three major directors in Germany’s New Wave (along with Herzog and Wenders), it’s the late Fassbinder whose 41 features–made from 1969 to 1982–convey the most obsessive interest in art and behavior.

Inspired by the French New Wave masters Jean-Luc Godard and Jean-Marie Straub, Fassbinder combined form and provocation to a far greater degree than either Herzog or Wenders. When a character’s humiliation occurs–usually at the apex of a highly stylized composition and coldly plotted cruelty–the emotion is unsettling but the insight is nearly exquisite. This made Fassbinder’s films less than traditionally satisfying since he was, to the end, an unwavering acolyte of Brechtian distancing devices. But this didactic theatricality–his in-your-face cinema–has become even more fascinating over the years as a political strategy with heart.

Fassbinder’s view of everyday brutality reminds me of an early 70s play in which one character says, "I don’t know if I should take that as an insult," and the other responds, "It is an insult. Can you take it?" Though not a particular fan of his films as they were released in the U.S., my appreciation of them evolved as less credible filmmakers bungled the analysis of sex and politics that Fassbinder evidently mastered. The radicalism that set Fassbinder apart came, significantly, from working out his own sexual and moral ideas. As the most openly gay writer-director of his era, Fassbinder’s range of interests shames the narrowness that passes for gay-identified work today. Fassbinder’s personal agenda was inextricable from his fascination with how all humans interact.

Strange to call these films with off-putting characters and outre content principled, but that was the key to Fassbinder’s art. Fox and His Friends (1975) has to be the most scathing portrait ever of the crushing elitism among gay men and yet it is also, clearly, Fassbinder’s study of modern disaffection in general. Veronika Voss (1982) updates Sunset Boulevard not for druggy camp decadence but to uniquely reflect on post-war Germany’s psychic wounds. Fassbinder balanced the expression of private turmoil that contemporary gay artists might claim as their special outsider’s insight with an extraordinary sense of how popular art is understood. Because Haynes, Daldry and whatever-he-is LaBute are such industry insiders, they don’t show Fassbinder’s rigor or honesty.

Take Far From Heaven, its sanctimony regarding feminism, homophobia and racism is intended to make 2002 viewers feel more enlightened than 50s Americans. But Fassbinder gave a tougher, less flattering look at contemporary mores. Instead of lamely imitating Douglas Sirk’s technicolor, Fassbinder understood that Sirk’s social critique could be applied to the modern world without irony. In Fear Eats the Soul/Ali (1974), audacious Fassbinder turned the May/December romance of Sirk’s All That Heaven Allows into a black/white, strikingly young/old, immigrant/citizen idyll. It first upsets a bigoted community but then confounds the emotional resources of the lovelorn couple. (The pairing of elderly Brigitte Mira and powerfully sensual El Hedi ben Salem is the highpoint of Fassbinder’s frequent black fetishism.) This harsh vision never says love is impossible, just that it is itself difficult.

That troubling insight may orginate from Fassbinder’s own experiences in gay life’s experimentation, self-sufficiency and personal license, but Fassbinder–no less than the great Tennessee Williams–showed all this to be endemic to the human comedy. In The Hours, Daldry romanticizes the despondency of three lesbians, suggesting that bored/repressed American housewives share the psychopathology of pioneering British artist Virginia Woolf–even sentimentalizing one’s decision to have children and then abandon them for her own pursuit of folly. But in The Merchant of Four Seasons (1971), Fassbinder realized that the cruelty of abandonment is based in character traits that have nothing to do with gayness or repression–just inexcusable, unlovely selfishness.

Watching Fassbinder’s various spectacles of inhumanity can be rough going. His style is demanding and enigmatic but at least it doesn’t fall for the mystification that makes cruelty seem an aspect of hipness like Neil LaBute–a misanthrope who has mesmerized a generation of naive actors and critics into thinking his own beastly opportunism (Your Friends and Neighbors, Nurse Betty, In the Company of Men) reveals something besides his own heartlessness. In Fassbinder’s exemplary use of modern moods, he exposes the processes of human betrayal in art, even in hip rebellion; that’s what makes his first feature, Love Is Colder Than Death, and his 1976 I Only Want You to Love Me outstanding instances of the creative and philosophical rigor that LaBute lacks.

Today, Fassbinder’s unprecedented boldness benefits from historical perspective. His zonked, dissolute characters can be seen as responses to Warhol’s underground freaks. They anticipate John Waters’ deviants-with-charmed-lives and Almodovar’s crazed romantics–but without the sweetness. Like Waters and early Almodovar, Fassbinder didn’t comply with mainstream hetero-Hollywood conventions (he would have kept a plush romance like Talk to Her absolutely–sensibly–grotesque). Fassbinder’s "straight" films Effi Briest and The Marriage of Maria Braun (both canonized in the Times as more important than his others) remain less interesting. That’s the drawback of mainstream success; Fassbinder was celebrated for something other than his essence–as Almodovar is today. I’d like to advance the notion that Fassbinder’s masterpiece is his little-appreciated Querelle, it’s the film that best summarizes his exacting formal experiments and his challenging pursuit of Love as something misunderstood by others and oneself.

It was perfect that Fassbinder eventually adapt Jean Genet (and not Cocteau as Almodovar has done). Genet hasn’t enough acolytes; he mastered subversive politics, literature and made what may still be the greatest film about gay eroticism, the 1949 Un Chant d’Amour. In Querelle, Fassbinder’s love song becomes a movie musical–not the MGM variety but in spirit like Jacques Demy’s. There are sailors loitering in an eroticized sea port; Brad Davis in the title role struggling with his need for/fear of submission (acting out Fassbinder’s own penchant for acting when he appeared in many of his own films with his chunky butt, crotch bulge and begging eyes); and Jeanne Moreau epitomizing female desire as a beacon for what her male bar patrons who hide behind various feints of masculinity.

Moreau’s singsong version of the Oscar Wilde line, "each man kills the thing he loves," is part of the film’s abundant camp allusions. Camp culture reverberates in Querelle with revolutionary seriousness–its red-hot visual scheme touches on the exotic subcultures of both Sternberg’s The Shanghai Gesture and Joe Gage’s Closed Set. Fassbinder’s own search for identity is awash in fantasy and dissatisfaction; knowing that, Querelle becomes both perplexing and deeply moving. It is the bravest example I know of a maverick filmmaker hitting it big without compromising but finding his sincerest mode of expression. In other words, he went out in style.

Wellspring’s big-screen reissue of Fassbinder’s films highlight this retrospective at Film Forum (Feb. 14 through March 27). They’re good examples of restoration and presentation–especially on video and DVD (and Sony’s DVD of Querelle is equally fine). These challenging movies never looked better.

Gerry Directed by Gus Van Sant Gus Van Sant has not returned to form in Gerry, but he has returned to homoeroticism. Matt Damon and a surrogate Affleck (Casey) interact in an enigmatic road trip movie. This may be a murder mystery or it may be the schizo battle of id and ego deceptively played out in an Antonioni-style desert that is also a moral topography. Is this really preferable to Finding Forrester? Surely it’s more honest than To Die For. When Damon and Affleck turn up dusty and tanned, lost and fatigued, Van Sant’s portentousness evokes that old Easy Rider tagline, "They went looking for America and couldn’t find it anywhere." Proof that Van Sant’s still searching for inspiration is the climax: a campfire conversation that recalls River Phoenix’s confession of love in My Own Private Idaho.