1975 ‘Faustrecht der Freiheit’ Directed by Rainer Werner Fassbinder
Fox, a former circus performer, wins the lottery of DM 500,000 and can now have the life and things that he has always wanted. While he wants to climb up the social ladder, it isn't without turmoil, and being torn between his old working class roots, and the shiny new facade of middle class consciousness.
Rainer Werner Fassbinder Peter Chatel Karlheinz Böhm Adrian Hoven Christiane Maybach Harry Baer Rudolf Lenz Kurt Raab Karl Scheydt Brigitte Mira Barbara Valentin Walter Sedlmayr Peter Kern Bruce Low Marquard Bohm Evelyn Künneke Elma Karlowa Lilo Pempeit Ingrid Caven Ulla Jacobsson Hark Bohm Irm Hermann El Hedi ben Salem
The tragic trajectory of Fox is evident from the start, though the exact details of his path are worth watching play out. This is a bleak portrait of a man unable to control his life, of the tragedy of being a misfit, of the power of money and love to destroy and blind and confuse. Fassbinder's awkward fool Fox bumbles through his life in a manner Terry Pratchett would call "gormless," and his helplessness is amplified by being a sort of fish-out-of-water socially. It is an indictment of class, a scathing sneer at the divisiveness of financial strata and the shifting mores between them.
At the same time, Fox is shown to be one of the few genuine people in…
The carnivalesque opening brilliantly sets up the deprave world Fassbinder takes us to. A world where the only morality is money and race, class, sex matter little as long as you have it. Fox isn't above following that adage but his inherent vulnerability makes him an easy target. This is more fragmented visually than other Fassbinder films, aligning with the central theme of "every man for himself." A masterpiece!
I commute to work by bus. On average it takes me twenty-five minutes to get there, but it varies with traffic. So, in the interest of killing time, much like with bowel movements, I tend to either to read, listen to podcasts or watch films on my way to and from work. And since quite recently MUBI has withdrawn their app support for non-Android based Sony Smart TVs and my old tablet has refused to run it after a recent update, I can only watch MUBI films on my phone, which is far from ideal. Perhaps I will invest in a Fire Stick at some point to make it work on my TV, but for now I tend to catch…
Framed through a doorway, I must say, you look so wonderful. In these moments there is such a thing called love. It doesn't last for our usual minute but for varying sets of multiple timeframes.
Ten or twelve or maybe twenty. Even sometimes it seems like it could stretch outwards & beyond the infinite. What wishful thinking that is though. We know it will only feel good for this singular minute, but how we both wish it could feel good past that.
Rainer Werner Fassbinder ranked
People will only want you so long as you have something they can get out of you, in this case money, is essentially the core message of Fassbinder's masterpiece.
On my rewatch (on the big screen!) I found Fox to be much less sympathetic than I had originally remembered and instead appreciated how naive he is. His rounded character, in parts good, in parts bad, makes for a more everyman figure; the circumstances portrayed in the film can essentially happen to anyone. The important thing to remember in regards to that statement, however, is that much of this happened to Fassbinder (in a way) during his relationship with Armin Meier. Taking part in his own victimisation…
For my money, Fassbinder's films are as punishing as anything out there. They're (usually) not formally rigorous, densely plotted or excessively violent. But there's such a suffocating sense of impending demise and Sisyphean doom for his protagonists that can be hard to stomach sometimes. It wouldn't be hard to stomach if his characters weren't always so perfectly wrought and easy to empathize with, but they are.
"Every decent director has only one subject, and finally only makes the same film over and over again. My Subject is the exploitability of feelings, whoever might be the one exploiting them. It never ends. It's a permanent theme. Whether the state exploits patriotism, or whether in a couple relationship, one partner destroys the other.
-RWF.
Bookended my day with gay German cinema!!!
Gotta try that matchstick/phone trick when I'm with bourgeois cunts who judge me for dipping my bread in soup.
If Prince Myshkin were gay and teleported into an even greedier, heartless world and Dostoevsky wrote with a pulpier bent you'd have this film.
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