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The white fedora, the leather jacket and the mini skirt, an acerbic recomposition of Bande à part. The perfect Fassbinder title to inaugurate the perfect Fassbinder cycle: He sits in a bare room, a bloke (Hans Hirschmüller) rips the newspaper out of his hands and gets knocked out, Fassbinder faces representatives of "the syndicate" in a makeshift office and is beaten unconscious, Hirschmüller returns to riffle through his pockets. The Munich pimp and the Botticelli hooker (Hanna Schygulla), the apex of the triangle is the would-be Delon (Ulli Lommel) forever reaching for the pistol inside his trench coat. Lazy days of filching sunglasses ("like the one the cop in Psycho had") and dragging bodies and laughing at each other's advances, vendettas and executions on the way to a bank robbery. "I've gone straight." "Other than a couple of murders, sure." New Wave attitudes (Rohmer and Chabrol are among the dedicatees) frozen and folded into sets of blanched tableaux, with hard shifts in angle cutting into flat frontal arrangements. Blasting light indoors versus engulfing darkness outside in a sprawl of prostitutes under umbrellas on the sidewalk, at the police station the camera pans back and forth in a nod to the long-take interrogation from Le Doulos. A pencil sketch of a poem, Fassbinder's feature debut wears the skin of a thriller only to mine the catatonic empty spaces between the action. Strauss in the supermarket and perfidy at the pinball parlor, the blonde (Katrin Schaake) fondling herself in the train: "What are you thinking about? Sex?" "The revolution." A note of À Bout de souffle dissolves at the close to leave a radioactive blank screen. With Peter Berling, Peer Raben, Irm Hermann, Ingrid Craven, and Kurt Raab. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |