Rainer W. Fassbinder's Beware the Holy Whore is thought to be the crowning achievement of the director's early phase, a dozen or so movies that he made with his Antitheater repertoire company between 1967 and 1971. The movie depicts a film production staffed by characters so comically depraved that the film seems satirical, something on the order of a Monty Python film. Apparently, Fassbinder and his associates were, in fact, so viciously perverse that the movie can be construed as a sort documentary -- Fassbinder apparently dramatizes dysfunction on the set of his previous film, a sort of Andy Warhol Western called Whitey. Fassbinder made Beware the Holy Whore in the month of September 1970 and released the film two months later. He completed one final picture with his cultish corps of actors in the Antitheater and, then, disbanded that group, although continuing to work with his favorites from these early productions. Fassbinder's last Antitheater productions were so self-absorbed and self-referential that they pose the risk of disappearing into themselves, crawling "up their own asshole" as it is sometimes picturesquely said.
Shot in startling color, Beware the Holy Whore is conceived as a series of static tableaux, sometimes interrupted by sequences of short scenes (sequence shots) presented in a discontinuous, syncopated fashion. Fassbinder's talents as a director of theater are on display -- he blocks the shots so that his actors can strike poses against the white backdrop of a resort hotel lobby and bar where the film production depicted in the movie is becalmed. (The film looks back to Godard's Contempt, a movie with a similar color scheme and Mediterranean setting and forward to Wenders The State of Things, also set in crumbling resort hotel in Portugal I think Fassbinder's movie is set on the island of Ischia off the coast of Italy.) On occasion, Fassbinder moves the camera, sometimes tracking his characters as they strut around the hotel lobby -- there is plenty to see: in the background couples embrace or dry-hump or languorously dance to the juke box and the bartender sometimes looks on censoriously or simply sprawls unconscious over the bar. The decor is a rehearsal for the extravagance of Fassbinder's later Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant. A big picture of a cockfight dominates one wall and there is a life-size terra-cotta saint who seems be imploring the movie people to behave with some semblance of humanity or, at least, simple reason. Sometimes, a ravishing sea-coast is visible. Although the movie is stagey and hyper-theatrical, a few scenes open out into the landscape -- some dialogue is filmed through the windshield of a moving car and a couple of shots occur on the hotel terrace or in its courtyard cramped with lights and other film apparatus (none of which is ever really shown being used in the movie.) In the penultimate shot after we have watched the one and only scene from the movie in production actually staged, a camera whirls around a decorative frieze, a bit like the gilt and stucco of a European rococo palace and one sequence is filmed in a room adorned with walls painted in the trompe l 'oeil style of Pompeiian murals. After the scene with the camera accelerating around the frieze decorating the wall, Fassbinder returns to a preferred mode of representation in the film, the principal characters all seated in a row disconsolately looking into the camera lens that is recording them.
The film begins with a weird monologue from a kid in black cowboy hat who seems to be the movie company's drug dealer. (He describes a cartoon in which Goofy realizes that he has become a part of a criminal enterprise.) The static shot featuring the kid is shot heroically from a low angle featuring lots of sky and wind -- apparently, the image harkens back to the wild, wild West motifs in Whitey, although we wouldn't know this without the movie's "liner" notes on its DVD case. (The film comes without commentary as part of the Criterion Eclipse series of lesser-known movies by famous directors.) The opening shot looks like an outtake from Tom Laughlin's Billy Jack (1971) -- obviously, the movie isn't modeled on the Hollywood picture which comes a few months later, but there was, it seems, something in the air at the time that establishes a certain look for hipster drug dealers. (You can see similar cowboy hats on the Berlin low-lifes in Werner Herzog's Stroszek). The movie, then, traps us in the hotel lobby where the film's characters are getting drunk, necking, and taunting one another. Two licentious looking young women survey the people in the bar and one of them says: "This place is crawling with gays" -- which is an understatement. The blonde bully of a director Jeff has promised a woman named Irm that he was going to marry her. But he's abandoned her and, every time, they interact he slaps her in the face. (She hysterically screams that he's beaten her "half to death.") Jeff is sleeping with Ricky, a handsome young man who, however, yearns to return to his wife and child. "Coach" a craggy-looking Roman stuntman (or fight-coach) tries to seduce Hanna Schygulla (playing herself); she teases him but, then, seduces Eddie Constantine, the famous French tough-guy who has been imported to supply some class to the movie. (Before seducing Eddie Constantine, Hanna first makes fun of him, imitating grotesquely Constantine's facial expressions.) "Coach" who delivers his lines in accented English gets drunk when rejected by Hanna and begins hurling glasses onto the floor. Then, to get the attention of his would-be girlfriend, he dives into the broken glass and cuts himself badly. It seems that Irm was financing part of the picture, but, now, that she's been beaten by Jeff, she won't offer any more money. The project has run out of cash and film stock. Jeff blocks a scene with his camera man, but they don't have film to shoot the sequence -- it requires Eddie Constantine to murder a woman by a karate chop (something he thinks will be ludicrous and that he opposes). Sasha, played by Rainer Fassbinder himself, waddles around in a white suit -- he's some sort of production manager and bullies everyone. But he is mercilessly bullied by Jeff, played by the baby-faced and sardonic, Lou Castell. The men all wear skin-tight jeans and boots; the women are dressed in easily discarded dresses and don't wear bras. Hanna Schygulla runs around half-naked in a little white outfit with no back and not much front either. (Fassbinder likes to have her sitting around with fully clothed men entirely naked.) All of the women have enormous hair, Schygulla's big perm is like an Afro. Jeff is smitten with Ricky although this doesn't stop him from sleeping with some of women hanging around the set. A translator gets fired, for no good reason -- this causes her family members, who are important local folks, to threaten to deport Jeff. Jeff ends up hysterically castigating members of the cast and crew and, then, pitches to the ground howling and tearful. "You all hate me," he says accurately. Finally, someone punches him in the gut while Hanna dances to Ray Charles and the other cast and crew members either neck or quarrel with one another. There are a bunch of short scenes demonstrating that complete erotic and artistic chaos has descended on the film company. Jeff stands on a sort of dock where the entire cast is piled up either like corpses at a Concentration Camp or the blissed-out participants exhausted from an orgy. Jeff berates the heap of bodies. We see the murder scene in the movie that is said to be about "state sponsored brutality" (it's called Patria y Muerte) and it's just as bad as Eddie thought it would be, totally unconvincing with the actors all laughing uproariously after Jeff cuts the take. Jeff says that he won't be content until his faithless lover, Ricky, is "completely destroyed." Ricky has earlier told someone that he won't be satisfied until Jeff is "completely destroyed." Irm says that she won't be satisfied until "Jeff is completely ruined." Notwithstanding this scirocco of revenge blowing about the set, Jeff says that the film will be no good unless everyone has fun (Spass) working on the project -- the notion of spassmachen (that is, "having fun") is one of the peculiar phrases that is repeated on various occasions in the movie. In summary, everyone more or less sleeps with everyone else, regardless of gender, everyone insults everyone else or mocks them or humiliates them in front of the others; everyone swills gallons of cuba libre -- even when the resources are gathered to make the film, no one really does anything to advance the project. Periodically, Jeff throws screaming fits and says that everyone is plotting against him. At one point, Hanna tries to stab Sascha -- it's not clear why she engages in this murderous assault but it's in keeping with the rest of mayhem occurring on this film location.
So what is this all about? Early in the film, one of the degenerate-looking women says that the film is being made by a group that is "like a commune." She is referring to the Antitheater company, Fassbinder's cult of which he was the resident tyrant and sole proprietor. (This "commune" is visualized in the scene in which all the cult members are heaped up on top of one another, either unconscious or engaged in sex, and Jeff berates them for being non-productive.) Critics interpret the movie as showing why the Antitheater paradigm of film production necessarily failed -- things were too intense, the characters had too much history or "baggage" as we might say, and a movie production company founded on everyone having sex with everyone else is probably not a good business model. If this is the point, it's a trivial one and, probably, not worth making across the length of 104 minute movie. Godard's Contempt is about the nature of representation and the impossibility of male-female relationships; Wenders' The State of Things is about how the great amounts of money necessary for film making lead inevitably to fatal compromises -- his film is, at least, partially about Roger Corman and gangsters. Fassbinder seems to be trying to figure out what wrong in the intricate web of sexual and sado-masochistic relationships that comprised the Antitheater -- but the riddle seems pretty easy to solve: Jeff (the film's surrogate for Fassbinder) is a monstrous egotist and, ultimately, his technique of pitting his players against one another is doomed to failure. As Homer Simpson would say: "Duh?" An example of how inbred the film is: Irm represents Irmgard Hermann, one of Fassbinder's longsuffering actors who, in fact, the director did severely beat -- but, in the movie, Irm is played by Werner Schoeter's muse Magdalena Montezuma and portrayed as a nauseatingly hypocritical hysteric. I assume that there are layers and layers of this sort of stuff going on in the movie, but it would be exhausting and pointless to try to sort this out. Nonetheless, it's a tribute to Fassbinder's superb eye and his wit that the film is watchable at all. And there's a great quote from Thomas Mann just before the film goes black: "I'm deadly sick of depicting humanity without partaking in humanity in the slightest." The soundtrack includes wonderful songs by Leonard Cohen, Ray Charles, and Elvis Presley -- it's a million dollar soundtrack that you couldn't buy for love nor money nowadays.
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