*(Constant reader, this episode series is a work in progress.)*
I. The Punishment Begins
So here we are. The first episode of Berlin Alexanderplatz, Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s 15-hour miniseries on “depravity and insanity” in the Weimar Republic.
For this episode guide, I will don a blogger’s cap, spleening my thoughts, my impressions, as though I had forgotten how to edit them into coherence. Readability. I guess I’m kidding. But really: my intent is to record my immediate response to each episode, one episode at a time. I’m sure I will offend. Many passages, I suspect, will feel repetitive. The cumulative effect may echo that of Fassbinder’s test of endurance, his obsessive quest to oppressively render one man’s downward spiral as obsessively as possible. Have I exceeded my quota of wordiness? Kind reader, you thought I could just barrel straight into a brilliant analysis of a supposed masterwork. You (perhaps) thought wrong.*
I girded myself for this first episode. Both mentally and physically, I laid myself down, the better to let this experience wash over me. My workday was done; I had just worked out; I was tired, relaxed, and ready. Thus, lying in bed, my head propped against a pillow, I started “The Punishment Begins.”
The opening sepia credits situate us. It’s a rather exciting evocation of time and place, a hell-train that careens through a montage of Weimarian stills, a blasted newsreel that announces only that this is the time and place. And we are in sunny Berlin. And we are face to face with our hero, Franz Biberkopf, as he is discharged from prison. He is crazed by the sounds of the city – he Screams – and a prison guard assuages him of his worries, at least for now: All one needs do is cross the threshold. The abyss (love) is just (a kiss away) over that line, past that door.
Stop. Ponder the way that Fassbinder’s camera focuses intently on Franz’s gait toward the gate. At first I did not know that he was being released from prison. Our man appears to greet the day with slight bemusement; he hum-drums to the borderline. Suddenly a prison guard appears and WE HAVE CONTEXT. Before this knowledge, we (the viewer) simply watch Franz up close, walking silently from point A to B, a tight tracking shot that, yes, lasts longer than it should. This tussle between necessity (of cinematic exigency) and indulgence (of a scholarly kind, turtling to focus on each little moment, making it count and doing so by exhausting the possibilities inherent in each little moment) will be the one by which this miniseries-cum-film lives and dies. The life-as-prison metaphor is like a grapefruit smashed in my face – but don’t ask me to explain how or why the metaphor, super-obvious, works. Perhaps it is the way the actors act: Reduced to an overgrown babe, an almost infantile cowering at his exit from the box (the womb) in which he’s been reduced to a mere statistic, Franz is a raw, curious nerve — wide-eyed, gruff, uninhibited. Already the depths of the acting suggest that Franz was, pre-prison, a child out of control and now, post-prison, after confinement for killing a whore, still a kid, reacting without filters, his body, his face, all expression. Welcome to Fassbinder’s map of the pre-Hitler Berlin.
Think I am going to cover this episode brick by brick, beat by beat? Ha!
Really, it is all episodic. And as glacial as some of the episodes-within-an-episode are, be it the odd philosophical meeting with a Hasidic Jew and the concentrated telling of a parable in a dark, dingy apartment, or the visitations with a bitter woman who finally sobs at having and losing Franz for his damned way of making people “unhappy,” or Franz’s ministrations at the window of his pad or on the ground, a sick animal who almost has to chant to no-one in particular that he is in trouble, he is lost, he will make an effort to be better, to be honest – all of this reaches me like a slow blooming haze, the conviction that we (the viewer) must grovel and bleat like Franz, must hump madly the angry women of this hateful world, must surrender ourselves to wretched, ironic parables and plain, inscrutable symbols (at one point Fassbinder inserts an algebraic equation over snow white), in order to GET WHAT’S GOING ON, and WHAT’S GOING ON WOULD MAKE ANY MAN CRAZY.
The moments remain moments, then. Like little fishies you can marvel at, or lump in with the rest of the scenery and (possibly) admire. At the end of this episode, I understood quite clearly what I had seen, yet knew not what to say, what to make of this 84-minute opener.
The plot thickens. Slowly. The man, an ex-convict now trapped in a different sort of cage, ordered by the police to not set foot in what sounds like two dozen districts, will — to the extent that a man of his disposition can, both unabashedly open to the world and despondent at his utter insignificance to it – make the most of what he has. He has committed himself to his latest whore, (she a sweet-faced open book), he has reconnected with certain old friends and faces (the landlady; the former lover’s sister; the drinking buddy; another former lover; the browned, yellowed stench and stew of Berlin City), and he has positioned himself for the rest of his life. Franz seeks to do better.
Ask not, reader, for a sense to this journey between walls. Life is hell. Don’t expect resolution. Life goes on.
The punishment begins.
Rating: B
*Curiously, for all of the praise critics have showered on Berlin Alexanderplatz, no review (I am sure I will find exceptions if I keep digging) amounts to more than the same hyped, un-explicated blurb: essentially, this is hard stuff to take but it will blow your mind. Almost as a matter of principle, I couch my reviews and articles here on the Exploded Goat in a fair amount of research. I’m not interested in saying what I have to say without having familiarized myself with what other people have said on the same subject. Basically, I don’t like to write in a vacuum. This episode guide I’m constructing is a vast experiment I’ve never tried. I will attempt to come at it with a sense of my own viewing and reading past and next to zero precedent for either Fassbinder’s films (I’ve only seen Ali-Fear Eats the Soul) or German lit. Or any sense of what makes the miniseries “good.” It’s a cold reading**, as drawn out and diary-like as my writing typically is not. And by the time I’m done with the experience (it won’t be a creative diet that excludes all else, hell no) — I might have gained something. Perspective? Who can say? Maybe I’ll just have had the experience. Of one thing we can be sure: By the time I’m done, the dead Fassbinder, he a fecund, coked-up libertine in life, will have finished five films in the afterlife.
**And by reading it I mean just that. No skipping forward, no turning back. Reading it as a text (I saw a Peter Jansen interview with Fassbinder. The director voiced his interest in writing a novel. He may have accomplished that via Berlin Alexanderplatz, a film whose novel someone else, a Mr. Alfred Doblin, wrote in 1929. Could it be that, in the miniseries format, Fassbinder found the perfect medium through which to get his penultimate vision across?) And… Reading the f*cker at night, when I’m in bed and have adequately decompressed from the day’s doings. I do all my closest reading then. Would that I could wake having digested each episode for all its worth, prepared to expound on it as no blogger has (or wants to). Me, pretentious? Get outta here. At any rate, once it is done, I should like to see how this episode guide stands – whether the sum is greater than its parts, and whether, like the film itself, it was worth the running time.
II. How is One to Live if One Doesn’t Want to Die?
Thrown by the first episode of Berlin Alexanderplatz, I settled into this, the second one, quite comfortably. Filling the space between episodes by going about my daily routine, I found that everything – EVERYTHING – I saw on Netflix or basic cable paled beside the memory of “The Punishment Begins.” With this realization came another: Not only did I long for entertainment as meaty as that first episode, I wanted to see what happened to Franz Bieberkopf as his story unfolded. I wanted to be there. I don’t normally go from one heavy, thought-provoking work of art to another. I take breaks; or, to put it another way, as my wild moods swing, so do my cravings for artistic food. With a sweet tonic of Bava I rinse a palette of Bergman. (OK, that’s an exaggerated example, but you get me.) This carries over to my reading habits. I can’t read a Faulkner novel and a Philip K. Dick novel side by side, nor do I feel like reading more than one PKD book a year. (For a paranoiac like me, paranoia that deep, that sharp, deserves nothing less.) Much of “The Punishment Begins” was hard going, but it floored me.
Two days later, I checked up on Franz.
“How is One to Live If One Doesn’t Want to Die?” fuels our desire to see him turn his life around. We join him and Lina, his live-in love, at a table in their chosen dive. He counts, not (presumably) for the first time since their coupling, their remaining marks (geld? coins?). Should Lina sell herself so they can make ends meet? No – that is out of the question. So Franz hustles another way, selling tie clips on the sidewalk, barking his product like it were so much magic in a bottle. Lina watches from across the street. One of Franz’s ex-flames lays a crisp bill on his wares. This adds insult to injury. The ex-lovers do not speak; and the encounter throws Franz off of his game: Later that day, he tells Lina that he’s not cut out for the gig. She should do it; she’s better at it. If memory serves (I’m watching the film with the utmost reverence. Until I have seen it in full, I don’t want to replay any of it. Otherwise I feel, however inanely, that I’m cheating. I’d be giving myself an “out” for not being the attentive viewer I claim/want to be)… If memory serves, Franz does not pocket the money his long-ago love gives him. Perhaps, his pride at stake, this move is understandable. More likely, it’s stupid. Festering between two world wars, Germany is in a severe financial and spiritual drought. Times are tough. The lean, mean streets will get leaner and meaner before they kind up. This fight, these times, will leech on the characters; will afflict our hero, for they spare no-one. That’s the central conflict of this episode – Franz against hard times, against what some characters refer to as “the new world.” And, already, we knew this from the first episode. Moreover, we knew that this historical “fiction” is a character study. Set against “the new world” of a Germany in rapid decline, Berlin Alexanderplatz pits Franz Bieberkopf vs. Franz Bieberkopf. And he’s not simply an allegory for his times. Here, in one hour, “How is One to Live” depicts Franz’s attempt to stick by Lina and to stay afloat, in a relatively straightforward manner.
The episode charts a number of close calls, and for this reason, I grew to like Franz in a way I had not expected. Test #1 was the lady from his past, on the street. Test #2 is his latent homosexuality – or, I suppose, his fascination with things taboo, homosexuality a considerable taboo in the period in which Berlin Alexanderplatz takes place. Franz resists, though. He doesn’t want to sell books of dirty drawings, or (as far as we can tell) reproduce the acts they show. Test #3 is harder to pin down. After Franz and Lina beer up at a nightclub, he meets a damnably drunk newspaperman. Soon Franz is in the subway, hocking the newspaper, which is sympathetic to the then-nascent Nazi party. Again, past and present collide: A communist that Franz used to know takes issue with his Swastika armband – with his seeming ignorance at the cause he’s working to promote. We too, as viewers, find this ignorance uncouth – and not just because Nazis are scum. It is the succumbing to said ignorance that betrays Franz’s effort at improving his life.
“How is One to Live” climaxes in the dive in which the episode starts. I felt I was watching a tenser, realer antecedent for the standoff in the tavern in Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds. (In both scenes a person’s Nazi-based sympathies are questioned.) Forced (again) to defend his selling of the newspaper, Franz heads off a group of commies bent on humiliating him. Call it test #3.5. Our common Golem is up for the challenge: He has poetry in him — but he sweats. Intuitively Franz knows that ORDER IS RIGHT, NECESSARY, and GOOD. But why the men cannot see this, cannot see that he only wants the best for him and his country – he belts a tribute to the Fatherland – confuses him. Perhaps the confusion catalyzes his rage. Perhaps his confusion is his rage. Still. He stops short of kicking ass, because they (and we) see that Franz is not as ignorant as he seems. So what if he’s unwittingly tied to the Nazis? Franz is a survivor. Life’s defeated him, yet it has given him the gift of perspective. He lumbers on, determined to raise himself and his love and his country to the ideals they are, at least in his head.
So closes the second episode. As I write, I am poised to praise the miniseries.
Do we see the command of technique? Berlin Alexanderplatz was shot in 16mm. The scrubbed starkness, the depth of the dark colors and the brightness of the lighter ones, is a thing to behold. The period detail, too. (I read that Fassbinder used sets left over from The Serpent’s Egg, a Bergman film.) Most importantly, we do not catch the actors acting. The world we have watched, we have been living. The sporadic narration — the stats that overlay certain scenes and the inner thoughts of characters, all of which are phrased and inflected in a flat third-person — now fits. It makes a kind of sense. I am reading a film. Yes. Not many filmmakers, dead or alive, have the balls to be so nakedly novelistic. (I think there is a tendency among modern filmmakers to avoid the expository/scene-filling voice-over. I’ve seen it put to great use [Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon] and to shame [Blade Runner, the first U.S. cut].) Placement of the camera is also key: Often it shoots the action from just behind or next to a piece of furniture, or beside a wall, as though the camera did not want to invade lives being lived – as though we had chanced on something raw, something we could not take our eyes from. Whatever we call Fassbinder’s method, I can only begin to describe it, and – it begs be seen.
I am hooked.
Rating: A
III. A Hammer Blow to the Head Can Injure the Soul
Money… We love money. Gotta have money.
God, the economy stinks. Sell tie clips. No, dirty books. Newspapers. No, no. Shoelaces. Yes, shoelaces! Have a beer! Selling shoelaces will help us make some real money. Have a beer!
Hmm. This episode introduces us to Otto Luders, Lina’s uncle. God, what a creep. Just look at that mug. You know he’s no good.
Yep. I saw something like this coming: Once he brings Franz into the shoelace racket, Otto perverts himself on one of Franz’s customers – a lonely widow who paid Franz handsomely for…some friendly conversation. WE THINK.*
Franz goes to her place the next day, this time with roses. Did Franz sleep with her? Just how affectionate was he? I guess he crossed a line. (Poor Lina. I hope she doesn’t find out.) Ah, but wait. The widow won’t open her door. She wants nothing to do with Franz. Otto, that rat f*ck bastard.
Now to Lina. She’s miserable: For some days Franz hasn’t been home. What’ll she do? What did she do to drive him away? Did she drive him away? Franzy? What happened to that horny hunk? Everything between them seemed to be going so nicely.
She goes to the dive they frequent (see how the loiterers on the street regard her). There, to help her, she beseeches Meck (i.e., Max), Franz’s Hitler-lipped friend from the old days. Meck’s a shifty-lookin’ dude. Vaguely sinister.
They go to Otto’s dump, where the light is low and the scraps are drinks. (BEER MONEY BEER MONEY BEER… It’s work-to-drink, mein feinds.) Poor Otto, that slimy rat f*ck bastard. His street smarts are no match for Meck’s. If he doesn’t find Franz by the following night, Meck’ll cut his guts out.
The search is on.
Otto finds Franz at a flophouse. CHRIST! There’s a bony guy sitting there just covering his dong. What the– And now he’s in the background and Fassbinder is showing us DONG. Aah!
It’s… So tired. I’m so very tired.
~Saturday, May 18~
Goddamn it. I played the entire episode the other night and fell asleep. What’d I miss?
Otto finds Franz at a flophouse and apologizes to him. Come back, Franz. Here, here’s some money.
Franz won’t have it. He throws a basin of water at Otto. He — what, is Franz having an aneurysm? He’s on the ground. He doesn’t want the water spilled to leak to the floor below. Must. Be. Kept. Clean.
Clean. Cleanliness is next to godliness. Rub it out.
So Franz won’t go back. The question remains: Did he screw the widow? Does the answer matter? Since Otto’s betrayal (Lina still doesn’t know what happened. We don’t either, at least not the specifics), he can’t handle the suggestion that he would have cheated on Lina. No, not even the faintest trace. That was then, this is now. Aah! He’s no good. Must be kept clean.
Otto leaves, fetches Lina and Meck. The lady who runs the flophouse doesn’t know where Franz went. Poor Lina. And Meck: what a pal, what a friend. Here he is, having done what he could to find Franz, and he’s kissing Lina. Who knows how long Franz will be gone? Come with me, Lina. I’ve always fancied you.
Gee, Meck. You’re such a swell guy.
And now we hear Peer Raben’s score come to gather us. (I love that accordion.) The end.
My eyes battle to stay open. So, so tired…
I dream I’m in a rat’s nest in the city. Outside my window, the noise of the city boils, and with it the sound of someone shoveling dirt. It doesn’t stop.
Rating: C+
*If they DID fornicate (it’s not shown), I missed a clear reference later on. Like I said at the start of this episode guide, I “show up” to view the series when I can and do my best to follow along in the moment.
IV. A Handful of People in the Depths of Silence
Little of consequence happens in this episode – but it is harrowing.
In a studio apartment, in another flophouse, Franz binges on beer. Drunk night and day, he will at times take stock of the other tenants. And from his window he may watch some of the folks on the street below, or in the building across the way – but he boxes himself in. Generally, he leaves the room only to exchange empty cases of beer for full ones downstairs.
Evidently he wants to glug himself to death.
Enter Baumann, the nosy next-door neighbor. Baumann looks like Abe Lincoln. He wears the one same robe, and he’s always around, cleaning things. Offering good will. Baumann, it turns out, is no stranger to death, decay, suffering. He was a medical orderly in the war. See how, in a long take, he cleans the mess that Franz made the night before: Scum, vomit and bottles crowd the floor, but Baumann only uses a washrag to…clean the edges of a puddle of puke. Something’s not right about this man. Unfazed (period), he is keenly aware of the comings and goings at the flophouse. He and Franz take to calling each other, respectively, Satan and Job – and when Franz’s growing interest in the illicit activities of his neighbors begets a thirst for sobriety, Baumann lays his cards on the table: If I heal you, what’ll I get in return?
In the midst of this friendly biblical repartee, Fassbinder breaks from the claustrophobic action (or non-action) to show us the God over which these men banter, a naked bearded God who loves his little lambs but slits their throats just the same. The shot is uninterrupted. The slaughter is f*cking REAL. Did Fassbinder really have to show this? Does the force of the point made (that love and death are blind, and any sensible grasp of the chaotic world necessarily conflates God with Satan; that a lifeline thrown to the man in need of help can be a hell, anyway)…does that justify the actual onscreen death of an animal? In the director’s mind (God’s mind) — yes. In order for the lamb’s death (and all it symbolizes) to be honest and true, we need face the shock of it, the pitilessness. In Fassbinder’s Berlin Alexanderplatz, the plain fact of these things must stand as such. As pure.
And so, with the ticking of the clocks and the buzz of the streets (I love the ambient noise patched in), Franz sobers up.
“A Handful of People in the Depths of Silence” is a tough episode to watch. It reminded me, in parts, of French Connection II, where an imprisoned Gene Hackman is injected with H then, later, kicks the drug cold turkey. Guilted for events that occurred in the previous episode, Franz numbs on, to better handle the wreckage. No-one, not Lina, not Meck, not even his landlady, knows where he is, and he likes that. Eva, a fling from the past, does find him, but he insists: By himself he must win the battle with himself.
In terms of its themes, messages and characters, or even the slow steady manner by which Fassbinder continues the story of Franz Bieberkopf, this episode says nothing new. There is, at its end, a crinkled return to the end of the first episode: Franz, having survived the last battle, will live to fight another day. He will, we sense, attempt to redeem himself for once and all. But will he succeed? Can he?
Fassbinder has already answered that question.
Rating: A-
V. A Reaper with the Power of Our Lord
It is time to meet Reinhold, a womanizer and a shifty seller of “fruit” who is in the money.
And tonight, Franz does.
If I thought that Meck looked like Hitler, well. Reinhold does too, but more so. One word: insidious. They’re little Hitlers, the whole lot — but there’s something appealing about Reinhold. Maybe that’s why he nauseates.
So Reinhold befriends our hero insidiously, using Franz as little more than a boot to the poxy, pouting Frauleins that Reinhold feels compelled to screw but detests. First he palms off Franze (the similarity in the names is deliberate. Give it some thought), then Cilly. Other girls, of course, wait in the wings. Always a charmer, that snaky Reinhold, and the women – they are meant for keeping until whim should dispose of them. Peer Raben’s soundtrack turns ominous, the piano warbling, keying us up. The point? Reinhold is a douche, a real number, and we (and Franz) should fear him.
Rainer Werner Fassbinder, the director, has by now bared the function for just about all we see: Franz can’t lose the bad people, the fascistic wolves at his every step. Likewise, the women, those sad objects, can’t be other than who they are. Don’t get me wrong. Franz is very much his own man (trying to make good, be good, in these times, this place). He has depths. Nearly all the characters do, in Fassbinder’s purposeful camera-eye. Yet at this point in the series, I’ve begun to value the surface more. To that end, Fassbinder really has made a drama fit for TV. The grubby amber tint, the small-box frame (1.33:1), the monaural soundtrack, the obviousness (and appropriateness) of the actors’ faces, the birdcage and the spotted mirror – even the monomaniacal focus on the trials and tribs of an ex-con in the Weimar Republic: Such immediacy* lends itself to the miniseries format, offsetting the story’s crawl. So – OK. Berlin Alexanderplatz is a curious thing. And yet, a question: With so many untrustworthy faces all around, why can’t Franz learn from his mistakes? He’s no dummy. He even admits, at the end of “A Reaper with the Power of Our Lord,” that Reinhold “destroys people.” Then, gee, man. STAY AWAY FROM HIM. STOP SEDUCING YOUR OWN BAD SELF.** GIVE IN OR GET OUT.
Oh, but kind reader, that is the very precipice on which this episode teeters. Our hero’s flirtation with danger and destruction (i.e., Reinhold)… Ugh. Over the course of the episodes I’ve seen, I’ll just say that Franz is bagging and shagging and huffing and puffing danger and destruction… His addiction to these things has sealed his fate. Does this make life/God/the director cruel? Hmm. I’m not sure if Fassbinder’s deliberateness has more to do with a statement and/or a vision of life he would like to make, or whether said deliberateness is merely the function by which he stretches the story to the number of episodes he agreed to make. I could be over-thinking this.
To revisit an earlier point: For all of its depth as a novelistic depiction of blighted life, Berlin Alexanderplatz works best, in Fassbinder’s hands, as a surface. Giving it a glacial (literate) grist, he delivers what you might call a thinking man’s soap opera. I don’t see it as either very deep or very entertaining. Occupying, though, a middle ground between the two ends, it does fascinate.
$
Five episodes in, and with eight more to go, I want to take a step back. Having discussed the fascination of Berlin Alexanderplatz, let’s extend that discussion to the fascination at its root, the one we have with practically all things Weimar. What is it about this era that draws us to it? Before this episode guide ends, I hope to know. Can it be as simple as: the culture produced great art (from Christopher Isherwood’s Berlin Stories, to Visconti’s Gotterdammerung, to Cabaret, to Lotte Eisner’s The Haunted Screen and all of the films and directors mentioned therein; to artwork by George Grosz, to David Bowie’s Berlin trilogy [let’s add Hitler’s Mein Kampf, for its priceless absurdity]), AND so much pain, in an inextricable, endless loop of art and pain? Can it be that in some ways the culture mirrors one I’m a part of now, in America? Choked with ghastly reparations (due to the Treaty of Versailles), the Germany of the Weimar years hyper-inflated its currency as it struggled to be a progressive democracy. Faced with a choice between the supposed order and stability that the Nazis represented and the seeming chaos of the communists, the country opted for order – and tragically, murderously, fell for the shallow safety of a pompous, deluded demagogue, a “savior” who really knew how to work a room, rousing the passions of a beaten people. If you think I’m actively comparing Hitler to Obama, you should re-read this paragraph. I just see historical parallels. As a country utterly demoralized, Nazi (and Weimar) Germany seems to me an epoch, the last grave example of a desperate democracy (would-be or otherwise) that managed to scare the bejesus out of everyone. As for how that impacts or explains my fascination with the Weimar era, I’m at a bit of a loss.
Rating: B+
*Reviewing Berlin Alexanderplatz, I’m reminded of director Douglas Sirk’s influence on Fassbinder. Sirk was important to Fassbinder. Theoretically, the relative tightness and cheapness of the TV miniseries format (yes, exceptions exist, everywhere, but movies are generally costlier) complements this reading of Fassbinder’s technique. (On this point, I may change my mind. You can’t rely on me for anything.) Notice, too, how non-show-offy he can be, almost like a Hollywood stalwart from before the age of the Movie Brat (and Fassbinder was a Movie Brat): Whole scenes may be long single takes, or one-take scenes with a few cutaways for coverage. The camera may track but it’s not wild. It stays intent on the people in the frame, be they under siege from a blinking neon light or making love on a bed behind a printing press. That printing press is a great, odd detail, as is all the signage we see in various settings, including a Metropolis banner-poster you’ll miss if you blink. Again, Fassbinder’s focus is on the people he wants us to follow. Due to the budget or a stylistic choice informed by a limited budget, he paints the picture with just enough detail, he works to get it FEELING right, and he puts the characters front and center.
**From the start, Reinhold and Franz eye each other as though they sense an instant connection there. Does each see himself in the other?
VI. Love Has its Price
At the end of “A Reaper with the Power of Our Lord,” Franz decided to keep Cilly, knowing of course that this would flout Reinhold’s will. In tonight’s follow-up, “Love Has Its Price,” Franz pays dearly for the choice. Not only does Reinhold claim Cilly (again), he tosses Franz aside. The result? A car runs the big man over.
He loses an arm.
Earlier in the episode, Franz notes Reinhold’s brute strength; how impressive the power, how puzzling the coldness toward Franz. To Reinhold, Franz spoiled the good thing they had. Naively, though, Franz thought the friendship was firm, that Reinhold wouldn’t care if Franz wanted to hold onto Cilly. He didn’t mean to scold Reinhold for f*cking and forgetting these little chickadees. But Reinhold is Reinhold. (Slime.)
It was only a matter of time before the wheel turned.
Fassbinder, as usual, milks some of the action for maximum impact. From the dreadful way that Reiny dumps his toots (it takes forever; her pleas to be let go easy, while practically pissed on, are revolting. I stopped feeling bad for her and saw her with Reinhold’s eyes), to the shot of Franz getting run over; to the poetic soliloquy that he makes as he rides with the motorist who ran him over: We feel these things deeply.
Illogic exists, though. Wise to Pums’ shiftiness from the start of the last episode, Franz goes uncharacteristically dumb here. I don’t get it. From the moment he steps into Pums’ art-deco office, I assumed he knew that Pums and his gang (devised of Reinhold, Meck, and others) did illegal sh*t for a nice profit. How could this have been news to him? Also, even if they used him as no more than a lookout, why didn’t Pums and co. do a better job of prepping him for what was about to go down? Perhaps, you say, they were down a man and didn’t want to scare him off, since that would have stopped them from starting. No. They counted on Franz to more or less know the score — which was sloppy. And he should have known, more or less, what he was getting himself into. The ignorance, overall… Agh. Does not compute.
Oh well. Onto the next episode!
Rating: B-
