![]() ![]() One, Fassbinder's theatrical experience shaped his conception of what "good acting" was, and he carried it over to cinema (realism didn't interest him energy and attitude did), and he was just as much of a self-driving workaholic under the proscenium as he was on film sets: he wrote 14 plays, adapted six classic plays by other playwrights, and directed or co-directed 25 more plays by other writers. This is a marvelous conceit, true to the spirit of early Fassbinder in a couple of ways. Even locations that would seem to cry out for grand cinematic treatment (including nightclub exteriors, alleyways, major thoroughfares, and indoor banquet halls there's even a rain scene) are presented as stripped-down stage tableaux, seemingly with the expectation that viewers will use their imagination to fill in what's not there, as they would if they were attending a play in a 40-seat underground theater in Munich. Characters often storm on- and offstage from the wings. There is no audience save for the viewer. ![]() In a bar scene, for example, the stools, the bar itself, and important objects are three-dimensional props, but the liquors and glasses and mirror behind the bar are painted. Actors inhabit key moments in Fassbinder's life on stage sets with minimal props. And it's so crucial to making "Enfant Terrible" work that this problem-might as well go ahead and call it a failing-undoes whatever magic that the film can work.īuilt around a bulldozer of a lead performance by Oliver Masucci-who carries on with rough-trade swagger, portraying Fassbinder as a demonic bully who gets into people's heads-the entire story is presented as if it were an early Fassbinder experiment, half-in and half-out of the late-1960s black box theater scene. Röhler's "Enfant Terrible" never gets a handle on that aspect of Fassbinder, that essential question. How can a single, feature-length motion picture capture such a titanic personality, with this many contradictions? And most of all, how can it walk that knife-edge, showing us why people believed in Fassbinder and wanted to give him money, work with him, and sleep with him, even as he smashed and burned his way through the international film scene, leaving ruin in his path? Fassbinder was also known to be dictatorial, abusive, chaotic, self-dramatizing, unreliable, and a lot of other unflattering adjectives: the kind of "difficult genius" who seemed as if he was worth the grief during and immediately after production, but whose cruelties scarred his collaborators. His formally precise yet often expressionistic approach influenced many filmmakers, including Paul Verhoeven ("Soldier of Orange" and "Spetters" seem to have an especially strong Fassbinderian streak), Martin Scorsese (" Mean Streets" and " Taxi Driver" in particular for a while, Scorsese employed Fassbinder's regular cinematographer, Michael Ballhaus) and Bob Fosse (whose affinity for Federico Fellini and Stanley Kubrick is well-documented, but in retrospect had a lot of Fassbinder in him). His films were intensely sexual, openly emotional, and psychologically as well as physically violent, often dealing with the authoritarian impulse in private lives as well as societies. ![]()
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