Walter Kranz (Kurt Raab) is a poet renowned for verse on Leftist revolutionary themes. But he suffers from writer's block. When his publisher refuses to give him an advance, Kranz visits his aristocratic mistress Fraulein von Witz and, after some S & M action with her (she fellates a gun), he shoots her dead while she is writing him a check and having an orgasm induced by her thoughts of money. Kranz goes home without a second thought and torments his fat, butch-looking wife who laments that she hasn't had sex with him for 17 days. Kranz's household is completed by his idiot brother, a big malevolent-looking doofus with squinty eyes behind dirty glasses -- the brother is a fly-fetishist, he collects the carcasses of the little creatures and identifies them with characters in the movie; now and then, he shouts "Fick Fliegen" -- that is, "Fuck flies!", something that he attempts from time-to-time with no success. Kranz' brother calls the protagonist's various mistresses "Aunty" and he's a rapist when not attempting to sodomize flies. Kranz has another masochistic girlfriend, a beautiful woman named Lisa (Ingrid Caven who had the misfortune of being married to Fassbinder)) who lives with her slovenly husband -- Kranz has to ask his permission to sleep with Lisa but permission is always given. A moron police officer is pursuing Kranz with respect to the murder of Miss von Witz, although also sampling the charms of the various women involved with the poet. For half the film, Kranz's chubby blonde wife belabors him with unrequited sexual demands. Then, the poor woman (who is the best thing in the movie) spends the second half of the picture dying of stomach cancer while Kranz simply ignores her. Midway through the film, one of Kranz' fans appears, desperate to have sex with her literary hero. This is a mewling masochist with her eyes grotesquely enlarged (it seems) by the pop bottle bottom glasses that she wears. Kranz takes her money and, then, allows his brother to rape her. He finally writes a poem about seamen capturing an albatross -- but it turns out that the little verse is wholly plagiarized from Stefan George, the homosexual proto-fascist poet active in Germany from the turn of the 20th century through 1934 when he died. When Kranz learns that he has stolen the entire poem from George, he decides that he will become the poet, dons a fright wig and paints up his face to look like the old fellow as he appeared in the early thirties and, then, recruits five young men to serve as acolytes. (George was gay and kept a squadron of young men around him to whom he declaimed his verse at candle-lit seances.) Kranz imitates George even to the extent of trying to become homosexual himself. He goes to a public toilet and picks up some rough trade but flees in horror from the encounter when he figures out what is expected of him. When Kranz fails to pay a prostitute for her services -- he's supposedly interviewing her for an article -- her pimps beat him up. They also beat up his female fan who has been doggedly following him around and offering herself to him (without success) for sex. Everyone in the film is profoundly masochistic and, when Kranz actually seems to enjoy the beating, his female disciple turns on him, says that he's not a strong man like Nietzsche (or Hitler for that matter) and leaves him. Luise has died and Kranz goes to the hospital in the aftermath. When he learns that his wife is dead, Kranz screams in horror and has to be dragged out of the hospital. This display of grief dismays Kranz' last two fan-boys who claim that they have been betrayed: "You preached to us that the object of life is death and decay," the lads say, appalled at his apparent grief. Kranz claims that he is merely feigning grief but the lads don't believe him and depart. Kranz goes to see Lisa but while he is bullying her, he turns his back and is shot. He falls to the ground apparently dead -- but the gun was loaded with blanks only. When water is poured on his supine body, he revives. In the next scene, we see him paid an advance because he has completed his novel on the Fuehrer's dead dog. Lisa's husband has run off with the masochistic woman in the pop-bottle goggles -- he's "strong enough for her," someone explain. Lisa moves in with Kranz and his malign, imbecilic brother -- the little family group has been rebuilt. The movie begins and ends with a complicated quote from Artaud that passes by too quickly to be deciphered, let alone understood.
Some of the movie is fairly amusing -- particularly the scenes in which Kranz pretends to be Stefan George, intoning gibberish to his pretty (rent) boys in a darkened room lit only by candles. There's a Marx brothers knock-off early in the film -- Kranz is at home trying to interview the prostitute while his wife caterwauls at him about his sexual failures; simultaneously, the cop is trying to interrogate Kranz while Kranz's brother periodically attempts to rape the prostitute all the while lasciviously eyeing his collection of dead flies. Then, the repo-men appear and begin hauling out furniture. It's all chaos and frenzy and Fassbinder knows how to shoot group scenes of this sort effectively. There's lots of sex but it mostly consists of Kranz fully clad thrusting away between the thighs of skinny women wearing peek-a-boo bras and crotchless panties. Everyone shrieks at everyone else and utters strange sounds and people are always spitting on one another. It's an authentic enough vision of human life, and, although caricatured, true I suppose on some level, but it's not really entertaining and the plot goes nowhere -- that's lots of sound and fury but... you know the rest of the quote. Fassbinder moves the film along at lightning speed and its efficiently made (although somewhat lackluster in execution),but, even so, the hundred minute film feels as if it would be better with about forty-five minutes cut.
No comments:
Post a Comment