"Film is a drug, and you fall for it... It's a dream factory that is nicer than the outside world."- Irm Hermann. Clearly, Rainer Werner Fassbinder put that to the test and then some!
This is in 90 minutes about as comprehensive a documentary as you can hope to see about the life and work - which means many ugly vibes and controlling and relationships that went bad (suicide among a couple of cases) - of a director who was also a genius and clearly made not only groundbreaking and harrowingly personal films but a body of work that, like one of cinematographer Michael Ballhaus's collaborator Martin Scorsese, makes you feel like you're entering into an entire worldview and atmosphere that is entirely his own. A shame then he has to be, in layman's terms, such a dick to so many of his friends and lovers and collaborators.
Some of this may not be entirely new if one has read a biography or read in depth about his work before (as I have, via the very good biography Love is Colder Than Death), but that part of the documentary is fine and welcome; the key thing is having all these wonderful women, and some men, who were actors and editors and camera persons and general assistants, to talk about him and his complexities. There's even a little about his childhood, his parents' divorce and that trauma (hey, for every Spielberg you get... a defiantly politically and sociological radical at the time), but that can only go so far as to explain all of his antisocial behavior.
It would have been easy to say he was *difficult* the whole time, but then why would anyone want to work with someone like that - there had to be something else in the work, in the worldview, in how RW was so deeply invested in "despair" as one subject says, and it speaks to the nature of obsessive and controlling creative that he is also described as sweet and caring and could "make you want to fly" as Hanna Schygulla says of him (his Marlene Dietrich as the doc says). Brigitte Mira, the deeply moving and tragic love interest of Ali Fear Eats the Soul and other RWF masterworks, is especially endearing in talking about him in a motherly aspect (maybe the only one to point out for all his faults he was "so young").
The core parts of the storytelling here are largely fine and, by nature of the subject matter alone, engrossing. If there's any sort of distraction it comes with the daft direction decisions this Documentarian takes, like all of the *extreme close ups* of his subjects like Ursula Straus, like she needs to become this garish subject for her relationships and work with Fassbinder to make sense, or those dips into the Berlin Film Festival that mostly tangentially make connections to the subject (at one amusing point the director asks one random guy on the street if he knows who Fassbinder is, says yes, describes him wrong, is corrected and then is like "oh, that's another Fassbinder I was thinking of a guy in Austria" um ok), until a part where he gets into a press conference without a permit to asks a couple of questions to Jeanne Moreau(?!) Okay.
So some of the choices here knock it down a peg, but it is still an important film to have been made and to present these performers into the mindset that had to go into being in Fassbinder's orbit (some who only had so many years after this like Mira and unfortunately Ballhaus, he's one of the most compelling and insightful interviews by the way). There are also some darkly funny laughs, like when one man - the men I must also note all got women's names by Fassbinder, just because he was that kind of a-hole - describes getting into a fight with him, knocking him out face down on the floor, and when he got up was hugging the actor like "I'm so glad you're in my film." Claudia?
What a glorious, complicated, horrible, tragic wunderkind.
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