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Oskar Röhler has created a heartfelt and appropriately awestruck portrait of the bleary Byron of the German new wave, Rainer Werner Fassbinder
“My day has 26 hours,” says Rainer Werner Fassbinder to a lover in this biopic. But even an extra two per day could hardly explain this director’s superhuman work rate, with dozens of movies, TV dramas and plays over a 20-year career in the 1960s and 70s – which coincided with nonstop emotional and sexual chaos, overeating, over-drinking, over-shouting and massive cocaine intake. Fassbinder was one of the few directors – or creative artists, full stop – who was a genuine bohemian, a sensualist, an anarchist and a real “disruptor”, a term that in our blander age applies to business gurus and political advisors.Oskar Röhler has created a heartfelt and appropriately awestruck portrait of the bleary Byron of the German new wave, but it’s a bit of a one-note portrayal: a fierce but aggressive study of Fassbinder, played by Oliver Masucci. Röhler covers Fassbinder’s career in an epic series of frenzied scenes, rehearsal room confrontations, press conference flounces and bathhouse hookups, presented on theatrical and stylised sets.
Masucci and Röhler portray Fassbinder as an inspired creative sadist with his cowering cast and crew, treating them mean and keen, and forming passionate attachments to rough trade guys that he put in his movies and then cast aside, with tragic results. In this film, it’s an aggressively dysfunctional approach that depends on mounting a continuous display of defiant browbeating – and an escalating intake of booze and coke, which resulted in Fassbinder’s fatal heart attack in his late 30s. Continue reading...