Baal

German director Voelker Schloendorff made this raw film adaptation of Bertolt Brecht's first play, Baal in 1968.  The film features Rainer Fassbinder in the title role and the picture records a decisive moment in the enfant terrible's career.  The movie is chaotic, puerile, and intensely irritating -- this is true to the source material, Brecht's first play was written as a semi-coherent provocation and it's generally a nasty piece of work.  Schloendorff, who later went on to make conventional films like The Lost Honor of Katherina Blum and The Tin Drum, both movies made with Hollywood production values, shot Baal guerilla-style using a handheld 16 millimeter camera that wobbles and zigs and zags through the desolate locations where the director stages the action.  The film was supposed to partake in the pervasive atmosphere of revolt in Europe in 1968 and, indeed, Schloendorff initially tried to cast Daniel Cohn-Bendit, the leader of the May revolt in Paris, in the title role.  Cohn-Bendit dropped out and Fassbinder, who had just completed his own first film, assumed the role of the monstrous and sadistic lyric poet, Baal.  The part doesn't exactly cohere and, in Brecht's original version (or versions) is somewhat self-pitying:  the savage poet is something of a momma's boy and, from time to time, Brecht clearly wants us to feel sorry for him -- the play invokes none of the Aristotelian unities:  it takes place over aseveral months, even possibly years, and the action happens in all sorts of locations:  there is a camp full of nasty foul-mouthed German lumberjacks in the Black Forest, a cabaret, a series of increasingly ugly and squalid taverns, and various open fields and meadows and truck-stops.  Brecht wrote the play as part of a reaction to another work assigned as reading to him when he was the German equivalent of High School -- the first version of the play dates to 1918 when Brecht was himself in his late teens.  He revised the play again in 1919 and, then, finally, admitted the autobiographical nature of the work in a tighter, more focused iteration in 1926 -- in that text, the writer actually conflates the adventures of Baal with those of the author.  Schloendorff snatches fragments of the play from all versions, recognizing that Brecht, a great poet even when he was a teenager, was profligate with his lyric gifts but didn't really organize the hero's adventures into anything other than a series of increasingly sordid episodes, all more or less discontinuous -- the play is notable for grotesque vehement scenes in the manner of Buechner's nightmarish Woyzeck and, also, relies upon short tableaux that seem to be derived from Shakespeare and Goethe's expressionistic (Sturm und Drang) Ur-Faust.  It would be easy to dismiss the whole enterprise as self-indulgent and callow (which it is) but Brecht is one of Germany's greatest lyric poets, one of the three or four best writers in that genre in the 20th Century and his linguistic gifts in all their extravagance are obvious throughout the mélange of short scenes that the director has stitched together from the three versions of the text.  At one point, Baal tells a woman that he is planning to seduce that "We're looking at one another with a glint in our eyes like two insects about to devour one another."  Although the line may leave something to be desired from an entomological standpoint (every insect that I've seen is pretty much expressionless), the verse is a good example of the feral and memorable violence in the play's diction. 

Baal doesn't have a plot and its stabs at narrative are feeble at best.  An ugly, menacing kid who looks like a juvenile delinquent, Fassbinder as Baal, is acclaimed as a great poet.  But he acts like a thug, getting drunk at a reception for him put on by his publisher and trying to seduce his publisher's wife, Emily.  Emily later goes to Baal's hangout, a bar frequented by truckdrivers, and the poet humiliates her demanding that she kiss a Black man (and prole) who is also a patron.  Baal's friend (and possibly homosexual lover), Eckard tries to persuade Baal to go with him on a pilgrimage to the Black Forest -- Eckard has a little tuning fork, a spectacularly huge and hideous chin (he looks like a cartoon character) and he is always blathering about writing a Mass.  It's a relief to the viewer when Baal gets fed up with him and knifes Eckard to death in a miserable pool-hall in the film's penultimate sequence.  Baal has an apostle, the adoring Johannes.  Johannes has a virgin 17-year old girlfriend about whom he consults Baal.  This is a bad idea:  Baal rapes the girl who, then, drowns herself.  Baal writes some nice (and famous) verse about the girl's corpse rotting in the river.  A couple of teenage girls are lured up to Baal's gloomy little room where he plans to have sex with both of them.  His mother, played by the formidable Irm Hermann, appears and throws the girls out while denouncing her son.  (And, then, she departs from the play, a major change from the source material since Baal's mother appears in about four or five scenes, including some pretty nasty stuff, in Brecht's original.)  Baal works as a lumberjack in the Black forest, seduces a cabaret singer named Sophie Barger, and, then, when she's pregnant with his child, drags her around by the hair and repeatedly knocks her down -- this all takes place on filthy-looking vacant lot next to a freeway.  She clings to his knees.  Her kind and tender lover says he'll take her back and protect the unborn child if Sophie will simply renounce her love for the brutish Baal.  But, of course, Sophie (here played by Margarethe von Trotta, herself soon to a well-known German director) refuses, proclaiming that she loves Baal despite his cruelty -- whereupon he slaps  her a few more times and kicks her. (Baal really knows how to show his women a good time -- Sophie's dates with him take place in a mud-patch surrounded by corn-stalks; Baal sniffs at her crotch and dabs her groin with mud.)  And so it goes until Baal stabs Ekard for no good reason, hides for a while at a truck stop and, then, drinks himself to death among the burly and indifferent lumber-jacks -- he perishes to the sound of chain-saws in the forest. 

This is all, more or less, unpleasant and rendered even more rebarbative by the studiously ugly 16 mm camera-work, the late sixties' trousers and leisure suits, and an absolutely ghastly musical soundtrack -- probably, the hapless Germans found the Muzak blues with treacle mouth-harp "cool" or "hip" but it's about as square as you can imagine and, almost, comically quaint, an artifact of the era best forgotten.  For some reason, the director smeared the corners of his lens with petroleum jelly and, in some scenes, the lighting makes the goo look like stalactites hanging over the heads of the characters.  In most cases, the grease blurs the image at the edges and gives the impression that we are viewing everything through a rather hazy oval porthole.  Dieter Lohmann's photography is anti-glamor -- he makes everyone with the exception of Hanna Schygulla (who has a vanishingly tiny role as a barmaid) look awful.  There's no way to make the young Hanna Schygulla look bad. 

I can't recommend the film although I think it's historically significant.  It's not a fully-fledged Brecht play because of the author's indifference to social and economic issues -- the text is ragged and fragmentary, basically an excuse for Brecht to showcase some excellent poems but it's dramatically unsuccessful.  As I have noted, Schloendorff's later work embodied Hollywood-style production values with challenging texts -- the director became the Merchant and Ivory of German cinema.  The film is certainly not a Fassbinder production because that director's work is embedded in American genre pictures and the picture lacks his ingenious mise-en-scene and the glittering mirror-filled cages where he chooses to stage most action. The repulsive Baal is a surrogate for the equally repellent Bertolt Brecht and, curiously, Fassbinder seems to take the role to heart to the extent that he also seems to have modeled his personal behavior on the sadistic reprobate poet for the rest of his life -- both Brecht and Fassbinder had the misfortune of becoming Baal, at least as far as the women (and in Fassbinder's case men) in their lives were concerned.